Economic mobility

This research estimates the effect of breastfeeding on child development: cognitive and socio-emotional, as well as health. Breastfeeding is just one of many ways in which mothers can influence their child’s development, and mothers who breastfeed may also be more or less likely to make other investments that affect their child’s development.

This paper is about an understudied, yet important, aspect of social mobility – absolute mobility, which measures the share of children with higher incomes compared to their parents around the same age.

Over the last decade, socio-economic mobility has declined and the shares in employment of low- and high-paying occupations has increased. This work investigates if job polarization has been a cause of the decline in mobility in the UK.

The authors examine the effects of the Top Ten Percent policy, which guaranteed students in the top ten percent of their high school graduating class admission to Texas Public Universities, identifying the effects on the students who were newly admitted as a result of the policy change as well as the effects on those students who were pushed out as a result of the policy.‍

If disadvantaged groups move to better neighborhoods at scale, does this affect opportunity in those neighborhoods for future generations? This paper answers this question by studying the largest natural experiment in moving to opportunity in US history: the Great Migration – when 6 million southern African Americans migrated North between 1916 and 1970 to escape racial prejudice and a lack of economic opportunity in the US South.

This study builds a unified non-parametric approach to predicting the unequal effects of trade shocks through both channels based on detailed microdata on spending and employment from the United States.

Can transport infrastructure promote long-term labor market opportunities and sever the occupational tie between parents and their children? Transport infrastructure arguably improves individuals’ economic opportunities by connecting them to employment possibilities that are farther away, and by creating better options locally.‍

Recent empirical work documents significant long-run wealth-rank correlations. This is a puzzle, in that the standard macro models of wealth dynamics generate a realistic wealth distribution but cannot capture these patterns. This paper identifies identifying a parsimonious extension of the standard model of wealth dynamics to account for these novel facts on the long-run persistence of wealth-ranks as well as for the observed moments of the wealth distribution.

The authors ask how membership in exclusive social groups affects access to top positions in the economy and society and, if so, who can join.

This study assesses who would lose and who would gain from stricter immigration policies across different local labor markets, taking into account changes in wages, housing prices and internal migration responses.

This paper studies the intergenerational mobility of the children of immigrants over 130 years of US history and answers two related questions: (1) Are children of immigrants more likely to move up in the economic ladder than children of natives from similar economic backgrounds? (2) Are children of contemporary immigrants more or less likely to move up in the economic ladder than children of immigrants from 100 years ago?

Addressing the problem of how to close the gap in university participation between rich and poor students, this paper shows that providing correct information about their university admission chances when introducing preferential admissions can lead to a pool of college entrants that is better-prepared.