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Newsletter
Inequality in Skills and the Great Gatsby Curve
This article presents evidence relating cross-country differences in intergenerational mobility to differences in inequality of skills.
Working Paper
The Geography of Travel Behavior in the Early Phase of the COVID-19 Pandemic
We use a panel of county-level location data derived from cellular devices in the U.S. to track travel behavior and its relationship with COVID-19 cases in the early stages of the outbreak. We find that travel activity dropped significantly as case counts rose locally. People traveled less overall, and they specifically avoided areas with relatively larger outbreaks, independent of government restrictions on mobility. The drop in activity limited exposure to out-of-county virus cases, which we show was important because such case exposure generated new cases inside a county. This suggests the ...
Working Paper
The geography of wealth: shocks, mobility, and precautionary savings
The spatial distribution of wealth in the United States is very heterogeneous, with important differences within and across US states. We study the distribution of wealth in a country and how it is shaped by the characteristics earnings across regions, and by the frictions individuals face to move and reallocate across space. For this, we develop a tractable model of consumption, savings, and location choice with many regions, incomplete markets, and heterogeneous agents facing persistent and transitory income shocks. Our analysis focuses on the role of income shocks, precautionary savings, ...
Working Paper
International trade and labor reallocation: misclassification errors, mobility, and switching costs
International trade has increased at a rapid pace in the last decades, altering production and labor demand in different sectors of the economy. The estimated effects of trade on employment and welfare critically depend on data about workers’ reallocation patterns, which is typically plagued with coding errors. I show that the estimated employment and welfare effects of international trade, and the estimated structural parameters of standard models are biased when the analysis uses data subject to misclassification errors. I develop an econometric framework to estimate misclassification ...
Working Paper
Intergenerational Health Mobility in the US
Studies of intergenerational mobility have largely ignored health despite the central importance of health to welfare. We present the first estimates of intergenerational health mobility in the US by using repeated measures of self-reported health status (SRH) during adulthood from the PSID. Our main finding is that there is substantially greater health mobility than income mobility in the US. A possible explanation is that social institutions and policies are more effective at disrupting intergenerational health transmission than income transmission. We further show that health and income ...
Journal Article
Land of Opportunity: Economic Mobility in the United States
Authors Jessie Romero and Kartik Athreya interpret data that suggest economic mobility has decreased in recent years. Many factors contribute to mobility, but for most people advancement depends on opportunities to obtain human capital---opportunities that are not as good for children in poor families. Initiatives that focus on early childhood education seem to yield high returns on investment. Their feasibility on a large scale is unknown, but they may have the potential to help the United States achieve a more inclusive prosperity.
Working Paper
International trade and labor reallocation: misclassification errors, mobility, and switching costs
Over the last few decades, international trade has increased at a rapid pace, altering domestic production and labor demand in different sectors of the economy. A growing literature studies the heterogeneous effects of trade shocks on workers’ employment and on welfare when reallocation decisions are costly. The estimated effects critically depend on data on workers’ reallocation patterns, which is typically plagued with coding errors. In this paper, I study the consequences of misclassification errors for estimates of the labor market effects of international trade and show that ...
Working Paper
The Allocation of Immigrant Talent: Macroeconomic Implications for the U.S. and Across Countries
We quantify the labor market barriers that immigrants face, using an occupational choice model with natives and immigrants of multiple types subject to wedges that distort their allocations. We find sizable output gains from removing immigrant wedges in the U.S., representing 25% of immigrants' overall economic contribution, and that these wedges alter the impact of alternative immigration policies. We harmonize microdata across 19 economies and exploit cross-country variation in immigrant outcomes and estimated wedges to examine the drivers of differences in wedges and gains from their ...
Working Paper
International trade and labor reallocation: misclassification errors, mobility, and switching costs
Over the last few decades, international trade has increased at a rapid pace, altering domestic production and labor demand in different sectors of the economy. A growing literature has studied the heterogeneous effects of trade shocks on workers’ industry and occupation employment and on welfare when reallocation decisions are costly. The estimated effects critically depend on data on workers’ reallocation patterns, which is typically plagued with coding errors. In this paper, I study the consequences of misclassification errors for estimates of the labor market effects of international ...
Working Paper
International trade and labor reallocation: misclassification errors, mobility, and switching costs
Over the last few decades, international trade has increased at a rapid pace, altering domestic production and labor demand in different sectors of the economy. A growing literature has studied the heterogeneous effects of trade shocks on workers’ industry and occupation employment and on welfare when reallocation decisions are costly. The estimated effects critically depend on data on workers’ reallocation patterns, which is typically plagued with coding errors. In this paper, I study the consequences of misclassification errors for estimates of the labor market effects of international ...