Search Results
Speech
Economic opportunity and income mobility--remarks at the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development Annual Community Development Conference, New York City
Remarks at the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development Annual Community Development Conference, New York City.
Speech
The monetary policy outlook and the importance of higher education for economic mobility: remarks at the Council for Economic Education’s 56th Annual Financial Literacy & Economic Education Conference, New York City
Remarks at the Council for Economic Education?s 56th Annual Financial Literacy & Economic Education Conference, New York City.
Journal Article
Neighborhood Types and Intergenerational Mobility
Neighborhoods that differ demographically also exhibit differences in how intergenerational mobility relates to job growth.
Working Paper
Selective College Access and Intergenerational Mobility
This paper studies how admissions preferences for lower-income students, alone or combined with information provision, affect college sorting, intergenerational earnings mobility, and aggregate earnings. We develop a quantitative model of college choice with quality-differentiated college types. We find that income-adjusted admissions substantially increase lower-income enrollment at selective colleges and improve intergenerational earnings mobility. Even larger-scale reforms generate only a slight decline in aggregate earnings.
Working Paper
Earnings Dynamics and Its Intergenerational Transmission: Evidence from Norway
Using administrative data, we provide an extensive characterization of labor earnings dynamics in Norway. Some of our findings are as follows. (i) Norway has not been immune to the increase in top earnings inequality seen in other countries. (ii) The earnings distribution compresses in the bottom 90% over the life cycle but expands in the top 10%. (iii) The earnings growth distribution is left skewed and leptokurtic, and the extent of these nonnormalities varies with age and past income. Linking individuals to their parents, we also investigate the intergenerational transmission of income ...
Working Paper
Measuring Intergenerational Income Mobility: A Synthesis of Approaches
The literature on intergenerational income mobility uses a diverse set of measures and there is limited knowledge about whether these measures provide similar information and yield similar conclusions. We provide a framework to highlight the key concepts and properties of the different estimators. We then show how these measures relate to one another empirically. Our main analysis uses income tax data from Australia to produce a comprehensive set of empirical estimates for each of 19 different mobility measures at both the national and regional level. We supplement this analysis with other ...
Working Paper
The Macroeconomic Consequences of Early Childhood Development Policies
To study long-run large-scale early childhood policies, this paper incorporates early childhood investments into a standard general-equilibrium (GE) heterogeneous-agent overlapping-generations model. After estimating it using US data, we show that an RCT evaluation of a short-run small-scale early childhood program in the model predicts effects on children's education and income that are similar to the empirical evidence. A long-run large-scale program, however, yields twice as large welfare gains, even after considering GE and taxation effects. Key to this difference is that investing in a ...
Working Paper
The Long-Run Effects of the 1930s HOLC “Redlining” Maps on Place-Based Measures of Economic Opportunity and Socioeconomic Success
We estimate the long-run effects of the 1930s Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) redlining maps on census tract-level measures of socioeconomic status and economic opportunity from the Opportunity Atlas (Chetty et al. 2018). We use two identification strategies to identify the long-run effects of differential access to credit along HOLC boundaries. The first compares cross-boundary differences along actual HOLC boundaries to a comparison group of boundaries that had similar pre-existing differences as the actual boundaries. A second approach uses a statistical model to identify boundaries ...
Working Paper
Human Capital in a Time of Low Real Rates
We argue that a long-term low real rate environment can increase labor income inequality, amplify the emergence of the working rich, and reduce intergenerational mobility. We provide a simple model with endogenous human capital accumulation and credit constraints to demonstrate this causal link. The mechanism operates through a tilting of the human capital gradient: wealthy households, more so than poor households, will increase human capital investment in response to low rates. Normatively, these tilting responses to low rates are inefficient, but higher capital taxes are not an ideal ...
Working Paper
Earnings Dynamics and Its Intergenerational Transmission: Evidence from Norway
Using administrative data from Norway, we first present stylized facts on labor earnings dynamics between 1993 and 2017 and its heterogeneity across narrow population groups. We then investigate the parents’ role in children’s income dynamics—the intergenerational transmission of income dynamics. We find that children of high-income, high-wealth fathers enjoy steeper income growth over the life cycle and face more volatile but more positively skewed income changes, suggesting that they are more likely to pursue high-return, high-risk careers. Children of poorer fathers also face more ...