This paper explores historical patterns of racial segregation and its relationship with the observed spatial variation in contemporaneous economic mobility established in Chetty et al. (2014). We combined data from the Equality of Opportunity Project with a novel measure of racial segregation...

This paper concerns the problem of inferring the effects of covariates on intergenerational income mobility, i.e. on the relationship between the incomes of parents and future earnings of their children. We focus on two different measures of mobility - (i) traditional transition probability of...

The relationship between social mobility and inequality is well studied in the literature, but far greater attention has been paid to 'vertical' than to 'horizontal' inequality. This paper focuses on mobility and horizontal inequality between ethnic, racial, and culturally-defined groups. Not...

This paper provides new evidence on the causal impacts of city-wide racial segregation on intergenerational mobility. We use an instrumental variable approach that relies on plausibly exogenous variation in segregation due to the arrangement of railroad tracks in the nineteenth century. Our...

We use the NLSY79 to produce the first estimates of intergenerational mobility in the U.S. by both region and race/ethnicity. We show that gaps in intergenerational mobility by race are significantly larger than those by region. In particular, there is no region in the United States where it is...