Punishing and toxic neighborhood environments independently predict the intergenerational social mobility of black and white children.

We use data on intergenerational social mobility by neighborhood to examine how social and physical environments beyond concentrated poverty predict children's long-term well-being. First, we examine neighborhoods that are harsh on children's development: those characterized by high levels of violence, incarceration, and lead exposure. Second, we examine potential supportive or offsetting mechanisms that promote children's development, such as informal social control, cohesion among neighbors, and organizational participation. Census tract mobility estimates from linked income tax and Census records are merged with surveys and administrative records in Chicago. We find that exposure to neighborhood violence, incarceration, and lead combine to independently predict poor black boys' later incarceration as adults and lower income rank relative to their parents, and poor black girls' teenage motherhood. Features of neighborhood social organization matter less, but are selectively important. Results for poor whites also show that toxic environments independently predict lower social mobility, as do features of social organization, to a lesser extent. Overall, our measures contribute a 76% relative increase in explained variance for black male incarceration beyond that of concentrated poverty and other standard characteristics, an 18% increase for black male income rank (70% for whites), and a 17% increase for teenage motherhood of black girls (40% for whites).

The fading American dream: Trends in absolute income mobility since 1940.

We estimated rates of "absolute income mobility"-the fraction of children who earn more than their parents-by combining data from U.S. Census and Current Population Survey cross sections with panel data from de-identified tax records. We found that rates of absolute mobility have fallen from approximately 90% for children born in 1940 to 50% for children born in the 1980s. Increasing Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates alone cannot restore absolute mobility to the rates experienced by children born in the 1940s. However, distributing current GDP growth more equally across income groups as in the 1940 birth cohort would reverse more than 70% of the decline in mobility. These results imply that reviving the "American dream" of high rates of absolute mobility would require economic growth that is shared more broadly across the income distribution.