RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED

STATES: AN INTERGENERATIONAL PERSPECTIVE∗

RAJ CHETTY

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NATHANIEL HENDREN
MAGGIE R. JONES
SONYA R. PORTER

We study the sources of racial disparities in income using anonymized lon-

gitudinal data covering nearly the entire U.S. population from 1989 to 2015. We
document three results. First, black Americans and American Indians have much
lower rates of upward mobility and higher rates of downward mobility than whites,
leading to persistent disparities across generations. Conditional on parent income,
the black-white income gap is driven by differences in wages and employment rates
between black and white men; there are no such differences between black and
white women. Hispanic Americans have rates of intergenerational mobility more
similar to whites than blacks, leading the Hispanic-white income gap to shrink
across generations. Second, differences in parental marital status, education, and
wealth explain little of the black-white income gap conditional on parent income.
Third, the black-white gap persists even among boys who grow up in the same
neighborhood. Controlling for parental income, black boys have lower incomes in
adulthood than white boys in 99% of Census tracts. The few areas with small
black-white gaps tend to be low-poverty neighborhoods with low levels of racial
bias among whites and high rates of father presence among blacks. Black males
who move to such neighborhoods earlier in childhood have significantly better out-
comes. However, less than 5% of black children grow up in such areas. Our findings
suggest that reducing the black-white income gap will require efforts whose im-
pacts cross neighborhood and class lines and increase upward mobility specifically
for black men. JEL Code: J0.

∗ The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of

the U.S. Census Bureau. The statistical summaries reported in this article have
been cleared by the Census Bureau’s Disclosure Review Board release authoriza-
tion number CBDRB-FY18-195. We thank Rick Banks, Jennifer Eberhardt, David
Ellwood, John Friedman, Roland Fryer, David Grusky, Anthony Jack, Lawrence
Katz, Adam Looney, Alex Mas, Amy O’Hara, Amanda Pallais, John Powell, Sean
Reardon, Jesse Shapiro, Emmanuel Saez, Robert Sampson, Isaac Sorkin, Floren-
cia Torche, William Julius Wilson, numerous seminar participants, and anony-
mous referees for helpful comments and discussions. We are indebted to Michael
Droste, Benjamin Goldman, Jamie Gracie, Alexandre Jenni, Martin Koenen, Sarah
Merchant, Emanuel Schertz, James Stratton, Joseph Winkelmann, and our other
Opportunity Insights predoctoral fellows for their outstanding contributions to
this work. This research was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,

C The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of President and
Fellows of Harvard College. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms
of the Creative Commons Attribution License ([Link]
which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the
original work is properly cited.
The Quarterly Journal of Economics (2020), 711–783. doi:10.1093/qje/qjz042.
Advance Access publication on December 26, 2019.

711
712 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

I. INTRODUCTION
Differences in economic outcomes by race have persisted for

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centuries in the United States and continue up to the present
day (Myrdal 1944; Duncan 1968; Margo 2016). For example,
in 2016, the median household income of black Americans was
$39,500, compared with $65,000 for non-Hispanic white Ameri-
cans (U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census 2017).
The sources of these disparities have been heavily studied and de-
bated, with proposed explanations ranging from residential seg-
regation (e.g., Wilson 1987; Massey and Denton 1993) and dis-
crimination (e.g., Pager 2003; Eberhardt et al. 2004; Bertrand
and Mullainathan 2004) to differences in family structure (e.g.,
McAdoo 2002; Autor et al. 2019).1
Most empirical research on racial disparities has tested com-
peting theories using cross-sectional data on a single generation
of individuals (Altonji and Blank 1999).2 In this article, we an-
alyze the sources of racial disparities from an intergenerational
perspective, focusing on the dynamics of income across genera-
tions.3 In canonical intergenerational models of inequality (e.g.,

the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, and Harvard
University.
1. See Online Appendix Table I for a more detailed categorization of alternative
explanations and selected references.
2. There are three primary exceptions to this characterization of the prior
literature, each of which addresses the lack of historical data linking parents to
children in different ways: (i) studies that focus on intermediate outcomes such as
test scores using data from schools, which contain information on parental income
and other characteristics (e.g., Jencks and Phillips 1998; Magnuson and Duncan
2006; Fryer and Levitt 2006); (ii) studies that use ethnographic methods (e.g.,
Carter 2005; Lareau 2011); and (iii) work using longitudinal survey data (Blau
and Duncan 1967; Corcoran et al. 1992; Hertz 2005; Bhattacharya and Mazumder
2011; Mazumder 2014; Davis and Mazumder 2018). Our study contributes to this
literature by (i) directly examining long-term outcomes such as earnings rather
than intermediate outcomes; (ii) presenting quantitative evidence that comple-
ments qualitative case studies; and (iii) presenting evidence from population-level
data that reveals several results that cannot be detected in survey data, such as
neighborhood-level variation.
3. We focus on five racial and ethnic groups: non-Hispanic whites, non-
Hispanic blacks, non-Hispanic Asians, non-Hispanic American Indians and
Alaskan Natives, and Hispanics, who together make up 98.4% of individuals with
nonmissing race information for the children we study. As has been noted in prior
work, there is considerable heterogeneity in outcomes in these five groups, and
our conclusions should not be interpreted as applying uniformly to all subgroups
in each population. For simplicity, we use “race” to refer to race and ethnicity;
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 713

Becker and Tomes 1979), racial differences in income distributions

in the long run are determined by differences by race in children’s
incomes conditional on parental income, which we call intergen-

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erational gaps. For example, if black and white children have the
same income distributions conditional on parental income—that
is, if there is no black-white intergenerational gap—income dis-
parities between the two groups would vanish in the long run
regardless of their initial magnitude.4 From this perspective, the
critical question to understand black-white income differences in
the long run is: do black children have lower incomes than white
children conditional on parental income, and if so, how can we
reduce these intergenerational gaps?
We study this question using longitudinal data that covers
virtually the entire U.S. population from 1989 to 2015. Building
on work by Akee, Jones, and Porter (2017), we use deidentified
data from the 2000 and 2010 decennial Censuses linked to data
from federal income tax returns and the 2005–2015 American
Community Surveys (ACS) to obtain information on income, race,
parental characteristics, and other variables. We focus on chil-
dren in the 1978–1983 birth cohorts who were born in the United
States or authorized immigrants who came to the United States
in childhood. Our primary analysis sample consists of 20 million
children, approximately 94% of the total number of children in
the birth cohorts we study.
We divide our empirical analysis into four parts. In the first
part, we characterize intergenerational gaps by race. We measure
children’s incomes as their mean household income in 2014–2015,
when they are in their mid-thirties. We measure their parents’
income as mean household income between 1994 and 2000, when
their children are between the ages of 11 and 22. Following Chetty
et al. (2014a), we measure intergenerational mobility using a rank
specification. We rank children based on their incomes relative to
all other children in the same birth cohort. Similarly, we rank
parents of these children based on their incomes relative to all
other parents with children in the same birth cohort.

“American Indians” to refer to American Indians and Alaskan Natives; and

“whites” to refer to non-Hispanic whites, “blacks” to refer to non-Hispanic blacks,
and so on.
4. In richer models in which children’s outcomes depend on other factors
beyond their parents’ incomes, income disparities may not vanish, but the inter-
generational gap remains a key determinant of the dynamic of income disparities.
We discuss these issues further in Section II.
714 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

We find that intergenerational mobility and the persistence

of disparities vary significantly across racial groups. White and
Hispanic children have fairly similar rates of intergenerational

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mobility. For example, white children born to parents at the 25th
percentile of the income distribution reach the 45th percentile
on average, whereas Hispanic children born to parents at the
25th percentile reach the 43rd percentile on average. Because
of these modest intergenerational gaps, the income gap between
Hispanic and white Americans is shrinking across generations.
If mobility rates were to remain constant across generations, a
model analogous to Becker and Tomes (1979) predicts that the
income disparity between Hispanic and white Americans would
shrink from 22 percentiles for the parents in our sample to 10
percentiles for their children (who are currently in their mid-
thirties) and ultimately to 6 percentiles in steady state.
Asian children with parents at the 25th percentile reach the
56th percentile on average, well above white Americans, echo-
ing the widespread perception of Asians as a “model minority”
(e.g., Wong et al. 1998). However, the exceptional outcomes of low-
income Asian children are largely driven by first-generation im-
migrants. Restricting the sample to Asians whose mothers were
born in the United States, we find intergenerational gaps between
Asians and whites of approximately 2 percentiles on average
across the parental income distribution. The changing patterns
of intergenerational mobility for Asians make it more difficult to
predict the trajectory of their incomes, but Asians appear likely to
converge to income levels comparable to white Americans in the
long run.
In contrast to Hispanics and Asians, there are large inter-
generational gaps between black and American Indian children
relative to white children. Both blacks and American Indians have
rank-rank mobility curves that are shifted down relative to whites
across the entire parental income distribution by approximately
13 percentiles. This remains true even among children born to par-
ents in the top 1%, implying that children born into high-income
black families have substantially higher rates of downward mobil-
ity than whites across generations, consistent with Bhattacharya
and Mazumder (2011). Indeed, a black child born to parents in the
top quintile is roughly as likely to fall to the bottom family income
quintile as he or she is to remain in the top quintile; in contrast,
white children are nearly five times as likely to remain in the top
quintile as they are to fall to the bottom quintile.
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 715

The large intergenerational gaps for blacks and American In-

dians relative to whites lead to disparities in earnings for these
groups that persist across generations. If mobility rates do not

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change, our estimates imply a steady-state gap in family income
ranks between whites and American Indians of 18 percentiles,
and a white-black gap of 19 percentiles. These values are very
similar to the empirically observed gaps for children in our sam-
ple, suggesting that blacks and American Indians are currently
close to the steady-state income distributions that would prevail
if differences in mobility rates remained constant across genera-
tions. This result shows that reducing racial disparities will re-
quire reducing intergenerational gaps—that is, disparities in chil-
dren’s outcomes conditional on parental income—for blacks and
American Indians. Transient programs that do not affect inter-
generational mobility, such as temporary cash transfers, are in-
sufficient to reduce disparities because income distributions will
eventually revert back to their steady states.
In light of this finding, the rest of the article focuses on under-
standing the factors that drive intergenerational gaps in income,
particularly between blacks and whites. One mechanical explana-
tion for black-white intergenerational gaps in household income
is that blacks marry at much lower rates than whites (Raley,
Sweeney, and Wondra 2015), leading to lower levels of household
income simply because they tend to have one rather than two
earners in their families. In the second part of the article, we
evaluate the role of marriage by measuring children’s incomes at
the individual rather than the household level. We find signif-
icantly smaller black-white intergenerational gaps in individual
income, of approximately 5 percentiles instead of the 13 percentile
gap in household income.
The reduction in the intergenerational gap when focusing on
children’s individual incomes, however, masks important hetero-
geneity by gender. The intergenerational gap in individual income
is 10 percentiles for black men across the parental income distri-
bution. In contrast, black women earn about 1 percentile more
than white women conditional on parent income. Moreover, there
is little or no gap in wage rates or hours of work between black
and white women, weighing against the hypothesis that black
women have comparable incomes to white women solely because
they work longer hours to compensate for lower levels of spousal
income. Black men, by contrast, have substantially lower employ-
ment rates and wage rates than white men, even conditional on
716 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

parental income. We find analogous gender differences in other

outcomes as well: black-white gaps in high school dropout rates,
college attendance rates, occupation, and incarceration are all

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substantially larger for men than for women. Black women have
higher college attendance rates than white men, conditional on
parental income. For men, the gap in incarceration is particularly
striking: 21% of black men born to the lowest-income families are
incarcerated on a given day, as compared with 6% of white men.
Why do rates of intergenerational mobility differ so sharply
for black versus white men? In the third part of the article, we
study whether differences in other family characteristics (e.g.,
family structure or wealth) explain these gaps. Controlling for
parental marital status reduces black-white intergenerational
gaps for men only slightly, from 10 percentiles to 9.3 percentiles.
Controlling for differences in parental education also does not af-
fect the black-white intergenerational gap significantly. The black-
white intergenerational gap remains substantial even after con-
trolling for differences in parental wealth, both when controlling
directly for wealth proxies such as home value observed in the
ACS data as well as when adjusting for differences in total wealth
using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). Our
findings are also inconsistent with the hypothesis discussed in
some prior work (e.g., Rushton and Jensen 2005) that racial dis-
parities may be due to differences in cognitive ability, as there
is no biological reason that racial differences in cognitive ability
would vary by gender.
In the last part of the article, we examine environmental fac-
tors outside the family that may drive black-white intergenera-
tional gaps (e.g., labor market conditions or the quality of schools)
by studying variation across commuting zones (CZs) and neigh-
borhoods (Census tracts or blocks) within CZs, as in prior sociolog-
ical work (e.g., Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls 1997; Sharkey
2013). CZs that have higher rates of upward mobility for whites
(e.g., the Great Plains) tend to have higher rates of upward mobil-
ity for blacks as well, with the notable exception of the Southeast,
where whites have especially low rates of upward mobility but
blacks do not. However, there are substantial black-white gaps in
nearly every CZ.
We continue to find large intergenerational gaps even be-
tween black and white men who grow up in the same Census
tract (containing 4,256 people on average) or block (containing
50 people on average). Among children with parents at the
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 717

25th percentile, black boys have lower incomes in adulthood than

white boys in 99% of Census tracts. The mean intergenerational
gap in individual income ranks between black and white boys

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with parents at the 25th percentile remains at 7.7 percentiles
with tract fixed effects and 7.0 percentiles with block fixed effects.
Hence, the intergenerational gap would fall by at most 30% if
black and white boys grew up in the same neighborhoods.
The fact that neighborhood differences explain relatively lit-
tle of the black-white intergenerational gap does not mean that
neighborhoods do not matter for children’s outcomes. We find sub-
stantial variation across tracts within CZs in both black and white
boys’ outcomes. Both black and white boys have significantly
higher incomes if they grow up in “good” neighborhoods—for
example, those with low poverty rates, high test scores, or a large
fraction of college graduates. However, black-white gaps are larger
on average for boys who grow up in such neighborhoods because
the correlation between growing up in a good (e.g., low-poverty)
area and income is greater for white boys than black boys.
Among low-poverty neighborhoods (those with poverty rates
below 10%), two factors are strongly associated with better out-
comes for black men and smaller black-white intergenerational
gaps. First, black men who grow up in tracts with less racial bias
among whites (measured using tests for implicit bias or indices of
explicit racial animus based on Google searches) earn more and
are less likely to be incarcerated. Second, the fraction of fathers
present in low-income black households in the neighborhood is
associated with better outcomes among black boys, but is uncor-
related with the outcomes of black girls and white boys. Black
father presence at the neighborhood level strongly predicts black
boys’ outcomes irrespective of whether their own father is present,
echoing the findings of Sampson (1987). Of course, these correla-
tions do not necessarily reflect causal effects because black father
presence and racial discrimination are both associated with many
unobservables, but they provide some guidance for the types of
neighborhood-level factors that may warrant further study.
Finally, using the methodology of Chetty and Hendren
(2018a), we show that black boys who move to better areas (as
measured by the outcomes of other black residents) earlier in their
childhood have higher incomes and lower rates of incarceration
in adulthood. These childhood exposure effects are race-specific:
black movers’ outcomes are predicted by the outcomes of other
black residents, but not white residents. These findings show that
718 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

environmental conditions during childhood have causal effects on

racial disparities.
We conclude that neighborhoods with low poverty rates, high

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rates of father presence among blacks, and low levels of racial bias
among whites have better outcomes for black boys and smaller
racial gaps. Examples of such areas include Silver Spring in Mary-
land and parts of Queens in New York, where black boys growing
up in low-income (25th percentile) families rise above the national
median on average in adulthood. But very few black families live
in such places. Less than 5% of black children currently grow up
in a Census tract with a poverty rate below 10% and more than
half of black fathers present. In contrast, 63% of white children
live in areas with poverty rates below 10% and more than half
of white fathers present. Importantly, these differences in child-
hood environment arise not just from neighborhood-level factors,
such as poverty rates or school quality, but also factors that affect
racial groups differentially within neighborhoods, such as racial
bias and race-specific rates of father presence. Our findings there-
fore suggest that reducing the black-white income gap will require
policies whose effects cross neighborhood and class lines and in-
crease intergenerational mobility specifically for black men.
The article is organized as follows. Section II presents a model
of intergenerational mobility and racial disparities that we use to
organize our empirical analysis. Section III describes the data.
In Section IV, we characterize intergenerational mobility by race.
Section V examines the role of differences in marriage rates and
heterogeneity by gender in black-white gaps. Section VI ana-
lyzes how family-level factors affect intergenerational gaps, while
Section VII examines variation across neighborhoods. Section VIII
concludes. Supplementary results and methodological details are
provided in the Online Appendix. Statistics on children’s outcomes
by race, parental income, and other characteristics at the CZ and
Census tract level can be downloaded from the Census Bureau
or Opportunity Insights and visualized using the Opportunity
Atlas.

II. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

We structure our empirical analysis using a statistical model
of income inequality and intergenerational mobility in the tradi-
tion of Galton (1886) and Becker and Tomes (1979). We use the
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 719

model to identify empirically estimable parameters that control

the evolution of racial disparities.
Consider a discrete-time setting in which t indexes genera-

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tions. For simplicity, assume that each family, indexed by i, con-
sists of a single individual in each generation t. Let yi, t denote the
income percentile rank of individual i relative to all other indi-
viduals in the same generation t, and let r(i) denote the race of
family i.5 We show in our empirical analysis that the conditional
expectation of children’s mean ranks given their parents’ ranks is
approximately linear for all races. We therefore model individual
i’s income as a race-specific linear function of his or her parents’
income:

(1) yi,t = αr + βr yi,t−1 + εi,t ,

where εi, t denotes an idiosyncratic shock that is independent

across generations and has expectation E[εi,t ] = 0. In Chetty et al.’s
(2014a) terminology, α r ∈ [0, 1] measures absolute rank mobility
for children of the lowest-income parents: the mean rank of a child
of race r whose parents have income rank yi,t−1 = 0. The parameter
β r ∈ [0, 1] measures the rate of relative mobility: the association
between the mean percentile rank of children and their parents’
income ranks for race r. We assume that α r and β r do not vary
across generations. Chetty et al. (2014b) present evidence in sup-
port of this assumption pooling races for recent cohorts, and we
present further evidence supporting this assumption by race in
Online Appendix Table X.
Under the linear specification in equation (1), one does not
need to track the evolution of the full income distribution to char-
acterize the evolution of mean outcomes by race. The mean rank
of individuals of race r in generation t is simply ȳr,t = αr + βr ȳr,t−1 .
Iterating over generations, we can write the mean rank in gen-
eration t + s, ȳr,t+s , as a function of the mean rank in generation

5. By focusing on percentile ranks, we capture changes in the relative position

of racial groups in the income distribution. As discussed in Bayer and Charles
(2018) and Manduca (2018), trends in the absolute dollar magnitude of racial
disparities depend on both changes in ranks and the marginal distribution of
income in each generation. We focus on ranks to separate the forces that affect
racial disparities from forces that affect the income distribution more generally,
such as skill-biased technical change. The rank-based estimates of mobility we
report here can be translated into dollar gaps using the methods in Chetty et al.
(2017).
720 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

t, ȳr,t :

1 − βrs
ȳr,t+s = αr + βrs ȳr,t .

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(2)
1 − βr

As s → ∞, βrs → 0 if β r < 1. Hence, the mean rank of individuals

of race r converges in the long run to a steady state in which
αr
(3) ȳr,t = ȳr,t−1 = ȳrSS = .
1 − βr

We now turn to the implications of equations (2) and (3) for

the evolution of racial disparities. Let  ȳt = ȳr1 ,t − ȳr2 ,t denote the
unconditional mean income rank gap between two races r1 and r2
in generation t. For expositional convenience, we consider a series
of cases of increasing generality.

II.A. Constant Relative and Absolute Mobility

We begin with the case in which absolute and relative rates
of intergenerational mobility do not vary by race: α r = α and
β r = β for all r. In this case, the racial gap in mean ranks in
steady state is  ȳ SS = 0, as all races converge to the same mean
rank, irrespective of their initial conditions ȳr,0 . The gap in gen-
eration t + s is  ȳt+s = β s  ȳt . As noted by Becker and Tomes
(1979), the rate of convergence in incomes across racial groups is
determined by the rate of relative mobility β. Chetty et al. (2014a)
estimate that β  0.35 pooling all races in the United States. This
level of relative mobility implies that racial disparities would fall
to 35% of their current level after one generation and just 12% of
their current level after two generations, as illustrated in Figure I,
Panel A. In the absence of differences in intergenerational mobil-
ity by race, racial disparities in income would dissipate relatively
rapidly across generations given observed levels of mobility and
vanish entirely in steady-state. Hence, an intergenerational model
with constant relative and absolute mobility is clearly inconsis-
tent with the persistence of income disparities by race throughout
America’s history (Myrdal 1944; Duncan 1968; Margo 2016).

II.B. Constant Relative Mobility

Next consider the case where absolute mobility varies by race,
but relative mobility does not: β r = β. Let α = α w − α b denote
the racial difference in absolute mobility, that is, the expected gap
in children’s ranks conditional on parental income, which we call
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 721

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FIGURE I
Intergenerational Mobility and the Evolution of Racial Disparities
These figures show how rates of intergenerational mobility determine the evo-
lution of racial disparities under the model in Section II. In Panel A, we assume
that both black and white children have the same rates of relative and absolute in-
tergenerational mobility. The solid line plots children’s expected ranks conditional
722 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

FIGURE I (Continued). on their parents’ ranks. We assume this line has a slope
of 0.35, consistent with evidence from Chetty et al. (2014a). Since mean ranks
are 50 (by definition) for both parents and children, this line must pass through

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(50, 50). The steady-state mean income rank for both blacks and whites, depicted
by the point where the solid line crosses the dashed 45-degree line, is therefore
50. The figure illustrates convergence to this steady state given mean ranks of 35
percentiles for black parents and 55 percentiles for white parents in the initial
generation, depicted by the vertical lines. In this case, white children have a mean
rank of 51.8 percentiles and black children have a mean rank of 44.8 percentiles
in the next generation, depicted by the horizontal lines. The gap therefore falls
from 20 percentiles to 7 percentiles in one generation. In Panel B, we assume that
blacks and whites have the same rates of relative mobility (β = 0.35), but absolute
mobility is 10 percentiles lower for blacks than whites (α w − α b = 10). Here, the
steady state for blacks is 42.3 percentiles, and the steady state for whites is 57.7
percentiles; hence the intergenerational gap of α = 10 leads to a steady-state
racial disparity of 15.4 percentiles.

the intergenerational gap. In this case, the racial gap in steady

state is
α
 ȳ SS = .
1−β

The steady-state disparity is directly proportional to the size of

the intergenerational gap α, as shown in Figure I, Panel B.
Reducing racial disparities in the long run therefore requires
reducing intergenerational gaps. Reducing the current gap  ȳ0
without changing α will not affect racial disparities in the long
run.
The gap in generation t + s is

(4)  ȳt+s = (1 − β s ) ȳ SS + β s  ȳt .

The gap in generation t is given by a weighted average of the

steady-state gap and the current gap, with the weight determined
by the rate of relative mobility β. As discussed, if β = 0.35 as
observed empirically, convergence to the steady state is relatively
rapid and hence what matters most even after one or two genera-
tions is primarily the intergenerational gap α.
The difference between the racial gap in the current gener-
ation and the steady state,  ȳt −  ȳ SS , measures the extent to
which current disparities are driven purely by intergenerational
gaps (α) versus historical factors ( ȳ0 ). If  ȳt −  ȳ SS is small,
we can infer (under our assumption that rates of intergenerational
mobility are stable) that most of the current disparity is due to
intergenerational gaps rather than transitory factors.
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 723

II.C. General Case

We now return to the general case in which both α r and
β r vary across races. Here, steady-state disparities and rates of

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convergence are determined by the race-specific rates of relative
and absolute mobility. As noted, prior work has established that
the average level of β pooling all races is approximately 0.35 in
the United States, but there is less evidence on how β r varies
by race (Mazumder 2014). Estimating β r by race is important
because groups that have low relative mobility (high β r ) could
remain stuck at lower income levels for many generations even
in the absence of steady-state gaps. For example, suppose whites
and blacks have the same steady-state mean rank and that whites
are currently in steady state, but blacks are not. In this case, the
gap in period t + s is  ȳt+s = βbs  ȳt , where β b denotes relative
mobility for blacks. If β b = 0.75, it would take eight generations
for the black-white disparity  ȳ0 to fall to 10% of its current level.
To summarize, race-specific rates of relative and absolute mo-
bility (α r , β r ) control the persistence of racial disparities and can
provide guidance on the types of interventions that may be most
effective in reducing disparities. If relative mobility is high for all
races (low β r ), reducing racial disparities requires policies that
reduce racial gaps in children’s outcomes conditional on parental
income (α), perhaps through changes in schooling or childhood
environment. Transitory interventions, such as temporary cash
transfers targeted by race, will have limited long-run effects un-
less they change the process of intergenerational mobility. In
contrast, if racial disparities emerge from low rates of relative
mobility (high β r ) combined with large gaps due to historical or
transient factors (high  ȳt ), then temporary interventions or poli-
cies that increase relative mobility would have more persistent
effects.

II.D. Changes in Mobility over Time

Our model’s steady-state predictions assume that intergen-
erational mobility for each race is constant over time. In prac-
tice, mobility rates may change across generations. For example,
Borjas (1992) proposes a model in which intergenerational gaps by
race emerge from differences in “ethnic capital” (measured, e.g.,
by the previous generation’s mean income or education), which
itself evolves across generations. From the perspective of a single
generation, our model with heterogeneous, fixed intercepts α r can
be interpreted as a reduced-form of the Borjas model in which
724 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

we do not microfound the underlying determinants of α r . Our

steady-state predictions should thus be interpreted not as predic-
tions of the actual dynamics that we expect to occur but as what

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would happen in a (potentially counterfactual) world in which the
differences in mobility we document below remain fixed over time.
These predictions provide a useful benchmark because they tell us
how mobility rates must change to achieve convergence, whether
via exogenous changes in policy, endogenous changes in ethnic
capital, or changes in other determinants of mobility.
More generally, richer models of intergenerational income dy-
namics would permit children’s outcomes to depend not just upon
parents’ incomes but also grandparents’ incomes (Long and Ferrie
2018) and allow for features such as assortative mating, endoge-
nous fertility, and endogenous human capital investment (e.g.,
Becker et al. 2018). Although steady-state outcomes and conver-
gence rates depend on many additional factors in such models,
rates of intergenerational income mobility (α r , β r ) continue to play
a central role and thus remain of interest.
Motivated by this framework, we focus on two sets of ques-
tions in our empirical analysis. First, how do rates of intergener-
ational mobility vary across racial groups? Second, what factors
lead to differences in intergenerational mobility by race and pro-
duce gaps that persist across generations?

III. DATA
We combine two sources of data housed at the Census Bu-
reau in our primary analysis: data from the Census 2000 and
2010 short forms and data drawn from federal income tax returns
in 1989, 1994, 1995, and 1998–2015. For certain supplemental
analyses, we also use data from the Census 2000 long form and
the 2005–2015 ACS. The Census short forms are designed to cover
the entire population; the Census 2000 long form is a stratified
random sample covering approximately one-sixth of households;
and the ACS is a stratified random sample covering approxi-
mately 2.5% of households in each year (U.S. Department of Com-
merce, Bureau of the Census 2000; U.S. Department of Commerce,
Bureau of the Census 2003; U.S. Department of Commerce,
Bureau of the Census 2014).
These data sets are linked by a unique person identifier called
a Protected Identification Key (PIK) that is assigned by Census
Bureau staff using information such as Social Security numbers
(SSNs), names, addresses, and dates of birth. The Census Bureau
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 725

uses the Numident, a data set covering all SSN holders, and other
administrative data to assign PIKs. All analysis in this article
is conducted using a linked data set that contains PIKs but is

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stripped of personally identifiable information.
The record linkage algorithm used to assign individuals
PIKs is described in Wagner and Layne (2014). Using data sets
that have both SSNs and other identifiers, Layne, Wagner, and
Rothhaas (2014) show that the error rate in assigning PIKs when
one does not have SSNs (as in Census surveys) is typically below
1% for government data sets. In the 2010 Census, 90.3% of indi-
viduals are successfully assigned a PIK (Wagner and Layne 2014,
Table 2). Bond et al. (2014) show that PIK rates vary slightly
across population subgroups in the 2010 ACS but exceed 85% in
virtually all subgroups. We present statistics on the fraction of
our target population covered by our linked data set below.
In the rest of this section, we describe how we construct our
analysis sample, define the variables we use, and present sum-
mary statistics. Further details are in Online Appendices A–C.

III.A. Sample Definition

Our target sample frame consists of all children in the 1978–
1983 birth cohorts who were (i) born in the United States or are au-
thorized immigrants who came to the United States in childhood
and (ii) whose parents were also United States citizens or autho-
rized immigrants.6 We construct this sample frame in practice by
identifying all children who were claimed as a child dependent on
a 1040 tax form at some point between 1994 and 2015 by an adult
who appears in the 2016 Numident file and was between the ages
of 15 and 50 at the time of the child’s birth.7 We then restrict the
sample to children who were born between 1978 and 1983, based
on their record in the 2016 Numident. Note that this sample defi-
nition excludes children who are unauthorized immigrants or who
are claimed as dependents by unauthorized immigrants because
unauthorized immigrants do not have SSNs and therefore do not
appear in the Numident file.
We define a child’s “parent” as the person who first claims
the child as a dependent (between 1994 and 2015). This person

6. We limit our analysis to individuals who are authorized immigrants because

coverage rates of tax data for unauthorized immigrants are difficult to determine.
7. Dependent claiming information is not available in tax returns from 1989.
We impose the 15–50 age restriction to limit links to grandparents or other
guardians who might claim a child as a dependent.
726 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

must be supporting the child to claim them as a dependent, but

may not necessarily be the child’s biological parent.8 If the child
is first claimed by a single filer, the child is defined as hav-

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ing a single parent. For simplicity, we assign each child a par-
ent (or parents) permanently using this algorithm, regardless of
any subsequent changes in parents’ marital status or dependent
claiming.
If parents never file a tax return, we do not link them to
their child. Although some low-income individuals do not file tax
returns in a given year, almost all parents file a tax return at
some point between 1994 and 2015 to obtain a tax refund on their
withheld taxes and the Earned Income Tax Credit (Cilke 1998).
As a result, virtually all of the children in the 1978–1983 birth
cohorts are linked to parents (Online Appendix Table II). We limit
our analysis to children born during or after 1978 because many
children begin to leave the household starting at age 17 (Chetty
et al. 2014a, Online Appendix Table I) and the first year in which
we have dependent claiming information is 1994.
In Online Appendix B, we assess the representativeness of
our analysis sample by comparing sample counts and descriptive
statistics to corresponding measures from the ACS. Our analysis
sample covers approximately 94% of our target sample frame and
has income distributions and demographic characteristics very
similar to the ACS (Online Appendix Tables III and IV), con-
firming that it provides an accurate representation of our target
population.

III.B. Variable Definitions

In this subsection, we briefly define the variables we use in
our primary analysis; details are provided in Online Appendix C.
We measure all monetary variables in 2015 dollars, adjusting for
inflation using the consumer price index (CPI-U).

1. Parent Income. Our primary measure of parent income is

total pre-tax income at the household level, which we label parent

8. An alternative method of identifying parents is to use information on rela-

tionships to household members in the 2000 Census short form. We find that the
tax– and Census–data based measures of parents are well aligned: for instance,
among the children claimed as dependents by parents on a 1040 tax form in 2000,
93% live with the same parents in the 2000 Census. We use the tax data to identify
parents because many of the children in the oldest cohorts in our sample have left
their parents’ houses by the 2000 Census.
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 727

family or household income.9 In years where a parent files a tax

return, we define household income as adjusted gross income; for
nonfilers, household income is coded as 0. We define our baseline

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parental income measure as the mean of parents’ household in-
come over five years: 1994, 1995, and 1998–2000, as tax records
are unavailable in 1996 and 1997.

2. Parent Marital Status. We identify parents’ marital status

based on their tax filing status in the year the child is first claimed
as a dependent by parents. We say that a child has a “father
present” if one of the tax filers who claims the child as a dependent
in that year is male.

3. Parent Educational Attainment. We obtain information

on the highest level of education parents have completed from
the ACS and the 2000 Census long form. We define “parental
education” as the mother’s education if available; if not, we use
the father’s education.

4. Parent Wealth. We proxy for parents’ wealth (again, pri-

oritizing the mother’s data) using information on home owner-
ship, monthly mortgage payments, home value, and the num-
ber of vehicles from the 2000 Census long form and the ACS.
We supplement these proxies using data from the Survey of
Consumer Finances (SCF) to control for total wealth. Fur-
ther details on the use of the SCF are provided in Online
Appendix F.

5. Parent Location. In each year, parents are assigned the

address from which they filed their 1040 tax return. For nonfilers,
we use address information from information returns, such as
W-2s.

6. Parent U.S. Native Status. Children are defined as having

a “native-born” mother if their mother was surveyed in the 2000
Census long form or the ACS and reported being born in the
United States in either survey.

9. We use the term “household” income for simplicity, but we do not include
incomes from cohabitating partners or other household members aside from the
primary tax filer’s spouse.
728 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

7. Child Income. We define children’s annual household in-

come in the same way as parents’ income, except that we use
data from W-2 forms to impute income for nonfilers (W-2 data are

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available only since 2005 and hence cannot be used to measure
parents’ incomes in our sample). We measure children’s individ-
ual and household incomes as their mean annual incomes in 2014
and 2015, when children are between the ages of 31 and 37.

8. Child Marriage. A child’s marital status is measured

based on whether he or she files a tax return jointly in 2015.

9. Child Race. We assign race and ethnicity to children using

the information they report on the 2010 Census short form, 2000
Census short form, or the ACS.

10. Child Employment. We use two measures of employ-

ment, one based on the tax data and one based on the ACS. In
the tax data, children are defined as working if they have nonzero
individual income in either 2014 or 2015. In the ACS, children
are defined as working if they report positive weeks worked in the
past year. This and all other employment-related ACS measures
described below are defined only among children who receive the
ACS at age 30 or later.

11. Child Hours Worked. Annual hours worked are mea-

sured in the ACS as the product of hours worked per week and
weeks worked per year.

12. Child Hourly Wage. Hourly wages are measured in the

ACS by dividing reported annual wage and salary income by an-
nual hours worked. The hourly wage is coded as missing for those
with zero hours worked.

13. Child Occupation. We obtain information on children’s

occupations from the ACS for children who have positive hours
worked.

14. Child Educational Attainment. We measure children’s

educational attainment based on the highest level of education
they report having completed in the ACS or the 2000 Census long
form (prioritizing the ACS, since it is more recent).
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 729

15. Child Incarceration. Using data from the 2010 Census

short form, we define an individual as incarcerated on the day of
the Census (April 1, 2010) based on whether he or she lives in any

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of the following types of group quarters: federal detention cen-
ter, federal prison, state prison, local jail, residential correctional
facility, military jail, or juvenile correctional facility.

16. Child Location. Children’s locations are measured based

on the address from which they file tax returns in 2015 or the most
recent year in which an address is available. For nonfilers, we
obtain address information from W-2 forms and other information
returns.

III.C. Summary Statistics

Table I and Online Appendix Tables V–IX report summary
statistics for children and parents, by race and gender. There are
21.3 million children in our analysis sample, of whom 94% have
nonmissing information on race (Online Appendix Table II). Of
those with nonmissing race information, 67% are white, 14% are
black, 13% are Hispanic, 3% are Asian, and 0.8% are American
Indian. The median household income among children in 2014–
2015 (between the ages of 31 and 37) is $53,730 for whites, $20,650
for blacks, $35,180 for Hispanics, $63,720 for Asians, and $22,260
for American Indians. Among parents, median household income
is $70,640 for whites, $29,200 for blacks, $33,060 for Hispanics,
$53,010 for Asians, and $34,850 for American Indians. These dif-
ferences in household income are partly driven by differences in
marriage rates: 79.3% of white children grow up in two-parent
households, compared with 32.2% of black children. Other vari-
ables vary across the groups in a similar manner. Notably, 10.3%
of black men in our sample of children were incarcerated on April
1, 2010 (between ages of 27 and 32), a far higher rate than for any
of the other subgroups.
In Online Appendix B and Online Appendix Table IV, we show
that income distributions measured in the tax records closely
match those in the Current Population Survey and the ACS. For
example, the median income in 2015 of children who appear in
both our analysis sample and the 2015 ACS is $33,370 based on
the tax data, compared with $34,000 based on the ACS data. Indi-
viduals recorded as having zero income in the tax records (because
they do not file and have no W-2s) have a median income of $5,000
in the ACS, showing that tax records do not miss substantial
amounts of income for nonfilers.
 TABLE I
SUMMARY STATISTICS ON INCOME DISPARITIES AND INTERGENERATIONAL MOBILITY BY RACE
730
White Black Asian Hispanic American Indian
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

Panel A: Children’s individual income in adulthood

Median income ($) 33,620 19,550 43,690 27,140 16,610
Mean percentile rank 53.3 42.0 60.3 48.1 39.6
P(child in Q1 | parent in Q1) 28.1% 28.7% 17.5% 23.2% 37.8%
P(child in Q5 | parent in Q1) 11.1% 6.3% 26.8% 10.8% 5.3%
P(child in Q1 | parent in Q5) 11.7% 13.8% 11.3% 13.3% 18.2%
P(child in Q5 | parent in Q5) 36.9% 26.2% 49.9% 31.4% 24.1%
Panel B: Children’s household income in adulthood
Median income ($) 53,730 20,650 63,720 35,180 22,260
Mean percentile rank 55.7 34.8 60.7 45.6 36.7
P(child in Q1 | parent in Q1) 29.0% 37.3% 16.7% 24.8% 45.5%
P(child in Q5 | parent in Q1) 10.6% 2.5% 25.5% 7.1% 3.3%
P(child in Q1 | parent in Q5) 8.7% 16.7% 9.9% 12.0% 18.8%
P(child in Q5 | parent in Q5) 41.1% 18.0% 48.9% 30.6% 23.0%
Panel C: Parents’ incomes
Median parent household income ($) 70,640 29,200 53,010 33,060 34,850
Mean parent household income rank 57.9 32.7 49.2 36.2 36.8
Steady-state household income rank 54.4 35.2 62.9 48.7 36.5
Number of children (1,000s) 13,490 2,750 685 2,615 165
THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

Notes. This table presents summary statistics on income and intergenerational mobility by race/ethnicity; see Online Appendix Table V for analogous statistics broken down by
gender. All racial groups except Hispanics exclude individuals of Hispanic ethnicity. Panels A and B present descriptive statistics on children’s individual and household incomes in
adulthood, respectively, and Panel C presents summary statistics on parents’ household incomes. All statistics are based on the primary analysis sample (children in the 1978–1983
birth cohorts). Child income is the mean of 2014–2015 individual or household income (when the child is between 31 and 37 years old), while parent income is mean household
income from 1994–1995 and 1998–2000. Children are assigned percentile ranks relative to all other children in their birth cohort, while parents are ranked relative to all parents
with children in the same birth cohort. Q1 and Q5 refer to the first and fifth quintiles of the relevant income distribution. All monetary values are measured in 2015 dollars. The
steady-state household income rank is a prediction based on the model in Section II given observed rates of intergenerational mobility. All values in this and all subsequent tables
and figures have been rounded to four significant digits as part of the disclosure avoidance protocol. Counts are rounded in the following manner: numbers between 10,000 and
99,999 are rounded to the nearest 500; between 100,000 and 9,999,999 to the nearest 1,000; and above 10,000,000 to the nearest 10,000. Sources for this and all subsequent tables
and figures: authors’ calculations based on Census 2000 and 2010, tax returns, and American Community Surveys 2005–2015. All statistics are cleared under Census DRB release
authorization CBDRB-FY18-195.

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 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 731

IV. INTERGENERATIONAL MOBILITY BY RACE

In this section, we characterize the evolution of racial dis-

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parities across generations using the framework in Section II.
We begin by estimating relative and absolute intergenerational
mobility (α r , β r ) for each racial group using the specification in
equation (1). Following Chetty et al. (2014a), we measure parents’
and children’s incomes using percentile ranks. We rank children
based on their incomes relative to all other children in the same
birth cohort. Similarly, we rank parents based on their incomes
relative to all other parents with children in the same birth co-
hort. Pooling all races, we obtain an estimate of relative mobility
of β = 0.35 in our analysis sample (Online Appendix Figure I),
very similar to the estimate of β = 0.34 reported by Chetty et al.
(2014a, Figure IIa) based purely on tax records.10

IV.A. Blacks versus Whites

Figure II, Panel A plots the mean household income rank of
children versus the household income rank of their parents, for
black and white children. For whites, we estimate a slope (relative
mobility) of β w = 0.32: a 10 percentile increase in parents’ rank
is associated with a 3.2 percentile increase in children’s rank on
average. The intercept for whites is α w = 36.8; that is, white chil-
dren born to the lowest-income parents reach the 36.8th percentile
on average. The relationship between children’s expected ranks
and parents’ ranks is linear across almost the entire parental
income distribution but is convex in the upper tail (top 5%). Chil-
dren from very high-income families have especially high incomes
themselves; for instance, white children with parents at the 100th
income percentile have a mean rank of 74.0.
Blacks have relative mobility comparable to whites (β b =
0.28), but have uniformly lower rates of absolute mobility across
the entire parental income distribution. For example, black chil-
dren with parents at the 25th percentile reach an income rank
of 32.6 on average, 12.6 percentiles below white children born to
parents with comparable incomes. Racial disparities persist even
at the highest income levels: among children whose parents are
in the top 1% (who have incomes of $1.1 million on average), the

10. The estimate increases by 0.01 because we measure children’s incomes

at slightly older ages in this article (ages 31–37 versus ages 29–32), reducing the
amount of life cycle bias.
732 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

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FIGURE II
Empirical Estimates of Intergenerational Mobility and Racial Disparities
These figures show how empirical estimates of intergenerational mobility
by race (Panel A) relate to the evolution of racial disparities (Panel B) us-
ing the model in Section II. These figures use the primary analysis sam-
ple (children in the 1978–1983 birth cohorts). Child income is the mean of
2014–2015 household income (when the child is between 31 and 37 years old),
while parent income is mean household income from 1994–1995 and 1998–
2000. Children are assigned percentile ranks relative to all other children in
their birth cohort, while parents are ranked relative to all parents with chil-
dren in the same birth cohort. Panel A plots the mean household income rank
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 733

FIGURE II (Continued). of children by parent household income rank for black

and white children. The best-fit lines are estimated using an OLS regression
on the binned series; the slopes (β r ) and intercepts (α r ) from these regressions

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are reported for each race. We also report white-black differences in mean child
individual income rank at the 25th, 75th, and 100th percentiles of the parent
income distribution. Plugging the estimates of α r and β r into equation (3), the
αb
steady-state mean rank for blacks is 1−β = 35.2 percentiles, whereas the steady
b
αw
state for whites is 1−βw = 54.4 percentiles, resulting in a 19.2 percentile black-
white gap in steady state. Panel B plots the empirically observed mean parent
and child household ranks by race against the predicted steady-state mean ranks
for blacks, whites, and other racial groups. Estimates for Asians are based on the
subsample of children whose mothers were born in the United States, as in Figure
III, Panel B. The circles show the unconditional mean income ranks for parents,
and the diamonds show mean ranks for children in our analysis sample.

black-white gap remains at 12.4 percentiles.11 Hence, high levels

of parental income provide no insulation against racial disparities.
The differences in mean ranks between black and white chil-
dren arise from the fact that blacks have much lower rates of
upward mobility than whites and much higher levels of down-
ward mobility (Hertz 2005; Bhattacharya and Mazumder 2011).
For example, among children with parents in the bottom quintile,
10.6% of white children rise up to the top quintile, but only 2.5% of
black children do (Table I; see the Online Data Tables for quintile
transition matrices by race and ethnicity). Among children with
parents in the top quintile, 41.1% of white children remain in the
top quintile, compared with 18.0% of black children. Perhaps most
strikingly, black children starting from families in the top quin-
tile have nearly the same chances of falling to the bottom income
quintile (16.7%) as they do of staying in the top quintile.12
Under the assumption that rates of mobility remain constant
across generations, we can predict how the black-white disparity
will evolve across generations using the model in Section II. Plug-
ging our estimates of α w and β w into equation (3), the predicted
steady-state mean rank for whites under the model in Section II
is ȳwSS = 54.4, illustrated by the point where the intergenerational
mobility line intersects the 45-degree line on Figure II, Panel A.

11. One may be concerned that this gap is overstated because white parents
have higher incomes on average within the top 1% than black parents (since the top
percentile is effectively unbounded above). However, the black-white gap remains
at 13.1 percentiles among children with parents in the 99th percentile, where that
issue does not arise.
12. This result is not driven by measurement error in parental income: we
average parent income over five years in our baseline analysis and find that using
longer averages does not affect the results significantly.
734 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

The steady-state mean rank for blacks is ȳbSS = 35.2. Hence, the
predicted (unconditional) black-white income gap in steady state
given current levels of intergenerational mobility is  ȳ SS = 19.2

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percentiles.
Figure II, Panel B plots the mean ranks of parents (cir-
cles) and children (diamonds) in our sample versus the predicted
steady-state mean ranks, by race. Both blacks and whites’ mean
incomes are close to their steady-state values, shown by the arrows
intersecting the 45-degree line. The mean rank of black children in
the 1978–1983 birth cohorts is 34.8, while the mean rank of white
children is 55.7. Hence, the observed unconditional black-white
gap in the current generation is 20.9 percentiles, very similar to
the predicted steady-state gap of 19.2 percentiles. Interpreted us-
ing the model in Section II, this result implies that blacks and
whites are in a steady state in which the black-white income gap
is due almost entirely to differences in rates of intergenerational
mobility rather than transitory or historical factors.
As noted in Section II, these steady-state predictions assume
that mobility rates do not change across generations. Whether
this assumption will hold going forward is unclear; the key point
is that if the race-specific levels of absolute mobility α r do not
change, there will be little progress in reducing black-white
disparities in the United States. To reduce black-white dispari-
ties, we must reduce intergenerational gaps (α) either through
changes in policy or other factors (e.g., via changes in ethnic capi-
tal as in Borjas 1992). Although the historical persistence of racial
disparities suggests that reducing α will be challenging, one en-
couraging result is that interventions that reduce α could lead to
rapid reductions in racial disparities across generations because
blacks have fairly high rates of relative mobility (low β r ). For ex-
ample, under the assumptions of the model in Section II, if black
children’s mean ranks were increased by 13 percentiles at all lev-
els of parental income, the unconditional black-white income gap
would fall to just 2.7 percentiles within two generations.

IV.B. American Indians, Hispanics, and Asians

Figure III, Panel A shows intergenerational mobility series
for Hispanics, Asians, and American Indians in addition to the
series for whites and blacks plotted in Figure II, Panel A. Rates of
intergenerational mobility for American Indians are very similar
to those for blacks. As a result, the predicted steady-state mean
rank for American Indians is 36.5, similar to that for blacks. The
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 735

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FIGURE III
Intergenerational Mobility by Race
Panel A replicates Figure II, Panel A including series for Hispanics, Asians, and
American Indians. Panel B replicates Panel A for children whose mothers were
born in the United States. Panel C replicates Panel A for children whose mothers
were born outside the United States. Panels B and C are based on the subsample
of children whose mothers appear in the 2000 Census long form or the 2005–
2015 American Community Survey because information on parental birthplace is
available only for those individuals. Panel C excludes American Indians because of
the small sample size of American Indian children with mothers born outside the
United States. See notes to Figure II for further details. Color versions of figure
are available online.
736 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

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FIGURE III
(Continued)

mean rank of American Indian children is 36.7, showing that they

too are very close to their steady state if rates of mobility do not
change (Figure II, Panel B). Hence, American Indians’ low income
levels are also due primarily to their low rates of upward mobility
across generations.
Hispanics have rates of intergenerational mobility (among
authorized immigrants and citizens) similar to those of whites,
especially at the bottom of the income distribution. As a result,
their predicted steady-state mean income (assuming constant mo-
bility across generations) is 48.7, only 5.7 percentiles below the
steady-state for whites. But Hispanics’ current income distribu-
tions are closer to those of blacks and Americans Indians than
whites (Online Appendix Figure II). Hispanic parents and chil-
dren in our sample have a mean rank of 36.2 and 45.7 percentiles,
respectively. Hence, unlike blacks and American Indians, Hispan-
ics are on an upward trajectory across generations and may close
most of the gap between their incomes and those of whites, as
shown in Figure II, Panel B. Their low levels of income at present
thus appear to be primarily due to transitory factors.
Asians have much higher rates of relative mobility than all
other groups, with β = 0.18. Asian children have high levels of
income across the parental income distribution; even Asian chil-
dren born to the lowest-income parents reach the 51st percentile
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 737

of the national income distribution on average. These patterns

have led to a perception that Asians are a “model minority” whose
success may serve as a model for other racial groups. One concern

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with this inference is that 81.8% of Asian parents in our sam-
ple are first-generation immigrants, who might have high levels
of latent skill but low levels of observed income in the United
States, leading to unusually high rates of observed upward mobil-
ity for their children. We evaluate this hypothesis in Figure III,
Panels B and C by focusing on children whose mothers were born
in the United States versus outside the United States.13 Asian
children whose mothers were born in the United States have out-
comes very similar to white children (Figure III, Panel B), whereas
those whose mothers were born outside the United States have
much better outcomes than white children (Figure III, Panel C).
Hence, the exceptional outcomes of Asian children are unique
to the children of first-generation immigrants rather than a
persistent feature of Asians who are U.S. natives. For this rea-
son, Asian children of U.S. natives have a predicted steady-state
income level that is similar to whites, as shown in Figure II,
Panel B.
Asians are not exceptional in having higher rates of absolute
and relative mobility among immigrants than natives. The same
qualitative pattern holds among Hispanics, blacks, and whites
as well, as shown in Online Appendix Figure III, although the
gap between natives and immigrants is significantly smaller for
Hispanics than the other groups.14 This may be because first-
generation immigrants have low levels of earnings when they
come to the United States despite having high levels of latent
skills that they transmit to their children or because immigrants
choose to live in areas within the United States that foster greater
upward mobility for their children (Abramitzky et al. 2019).
In sum, an intergenerational perspective suggests that the
racial disparities that are most likely to persist are for blacks
and American Indians, who appear to be in a steady state
with lower levels of income. Understanding the persistence of

13. These figures are based on the subsample of children whose mothers
appear in the 2000 Census long form or the ACS because we only observe where
the mother was born in those data sets.
14. Because of this, the predicted steady state for Hispanic natives is 47.3
percentiles, only 1.4 percentiles below the value for all Hispanics. In the interest
of parsimony, we present statistics simply by race and ethnicity here, pooling im-
migrants from different countries; in the Online Data Tables, we report analogous
statistics for second-generation immigrants by their parents’ country of birth.
738 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

disparities for these groups requires an understanding of why

black and American Indian children have lower incomes than
white children conditional on parent income. In the rest of the

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article, we test a range of potential explanations for intergener-
ational gaps among black children. We focus specifically on the
black-white gap because many of our tests require examining
small subgroups, and sample sizes for blacks are much larger
than those for American Indians.15

V. MARRIAGE RATES AND GENDER HETEROGENEITY

We begin our analysis of the sources of black-white intergen-
erational gaps by considering a simple mechanical explanation:
racial differences in marriage rates. It is well known that blacks
marry at much lower rates than whites (e.g., Raley, Sweeney, and
Wondra 2015). Differences in marriage rates could potentially ex-
plain the black-white gap in household income simply because we
count two incomes for most white children but only one for most
black children. In this section, we study the effects of differences
in marriage rates by focusing on measures of individuals’ own
outcomes and show that the results vary sharply by gender.
We first document the large intergenerational gaps in mar-
riage rates between black and white children in our sample.
Figure IV, Panel A plots marriage rates for black and white chil-
dren in 2015 (between ages of 32 and 37) by parental income per-
centile. Black children have substantially lower marriage rates
across the parental income distribution, with a gap of 32 percent-
age points for children with parents at the 25th percentile and
34 percentage points at the 75th percentile. White children at
the bottom of the income distribution are as likely to be married
as black children at the 97th percentile of the parental income
distribution.
To evaluate the impacts of these differences in marriage rates,
we focus on children’s individual incomes (excluding spousal in-
come). Figure IV, Panel B plots children’s mean individual income
ranks versus their parents’ household income ranks, by race. The
gap in individual income ranks is approximately 5 percentiles
across the parental income distribution, substantially smaller
than the approximately 13 percentile gap in household income
in Figure II, Panel A.

15. For completeness, we present parallel analyses for other racial groups in
the Online Appendix.
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 739

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FIGURE IV
Black-White Gaps in Marriage Rates and Individual Income
Panel A plots children’s marriage rates by parent income percentile for black and
white children. A child’ s marital status is defined based on the marital status used
740 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

FIGURE IV (Continued). when filing his or her 2015 tax return. Children in our
sample are between the ages of 32 and 37 at that point. Panel B plots the mean
individual income rank of children versus their parents’ household income rank for

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black and white children. Individual income is defined as own W-2 wage earnings
plus self-employment and other nonwage income, which is adjusted gross income
minus total wages reported on form 1040 divided by the number of tax filers
(thereby splitting nonwage income equally for joint filers). We measure children’ s
individual incomes as their mean annual incomes in 2014 and 2015. The intercepts,
slopes, and best-fit lines are estimated using OLS regressions on the binned series.
We also report the white-black differences in outcomes at the 25th and 75th parent
income percentiles. See notes to Figure II for further details on sample and variable
definitions.

However, the smaller gap in children’s individual incomes in

Figure IV, Panel B masks substantial heterogeneity by gender.
Figure V replicates Figure IV, Panel B separately for male and fe-
male children. This figure reveals that the black-white intergener-
ational gap in individual incomes is driven almost entirely by men.
We find gaps for men of about 11 percentiles across the parental
income distribution. In contrast, black women have 1 percentile
higher individual income ranks than white women conditional on
parental income. The finding that black-white racial gaps in in-
dividual income are substantially larger for men than women is
consistent with prior literature showing that black-white wage
disparities are smaller for women than men in the cross-section
(Darity, Guilkey, and Winfrey 1996; Neal and Johnson 1996;
Altonji and Blank 1999; Bayard et al. 1999; Blau 2012).
One interpretation of the results in Figure V is that black-
white gaps in labor market opportunities are small for women, but
large for men. A competing explanation is that black women also
have poorer labor market opportunities than white women, but
this is masked by an income effect on labor supply: black women
may be working harder to make up for having lower spousal
income.
One way to distinguish these explanations is to compare the
hours of work and wage rates of black and white women. In the
simplest version of the income effect hypothesis, one would expect
that black women would have higher hours than white women but
lower wage rates. We measure annual hours of work and wages
for children who appear in an ACS sample at or after age 30.
We define wage rates as self-reported annual earnings divided by
annual hours. We then convert hourly wages to percentile ranks
by ranking individuals relative to others in the same birth cohort
who received the ACS survey in the same year. Hours of work are
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 741

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FIGURE V
Black-White Gaps in Individual Income, by Gender
These figures replicate Figure IV, Panel B separately for male (Panel A) and
female children (Panel B). Individual income ranks are computed within a child’s
cohort pooling across race and gender. See notes to Figure IV for further details.
742 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

coded as 0 for those who do not work, while wages are coded as
missing.
Figure VI plots mean wage ranks, hours, and employment

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rates by parental income percentile for women and men. Con-
ditional on parental income, black and white women have very
similar wage rates, hours of work, and employment rates.16 These
results suggest that the lack of an intergenerational gap in income
for females is not entirely due to an income effect. In contrast,
there are very large gaps in both wage rates and hours of work for
men. Conditional on parental income, black men have wages that
are about 7 percentiles lower than white males, and work roughly
nine fewer hours per week on average. The gaps in employment
rates for men are particularly stark, especially for children grow-
ing up in low-income families. Black men with parents at the
25th percentile are 18.9 percentage points less likely to work in
a given year than white men, whereas black men with parents at
the 75th percentile are 11.4 percentage points less likely to work
than white men. The employment rates of black men with parents
at the 75th percentile are comparable to those of white men with
parents at the 9th percentile.
The black-white gap in wage rates may understate the true
gap in potential wages if black women with lower wage oppor-
tunities are less likely to be employed (Heckman, Lyons, and
Todd 2000). The similarity of employment rates for black and
white women rules out selection bias in which the decision to
work is based purely on potential wage rates. However, as noted
by Neal (2004), black women who do not work might have low po-
tential wage rates, while white women who do not work have high

16. This is true not just for means: the entire distribution of black womens’
wage rates and hours of work is very similar to the corresponding distributions
for whites, conditional on parent income (not reported). We also find that the
occupational distributions of black and white women are similar conditional on
parental income (Online Appendix Figure IV), suggesting that black women are
not substituting toward occupations with lower amenities to obtain higher wages.
We do find, however, that white women are less likely than black women to hold
jobs that pay traditional wage earnings (reported on form W-2) and are more likely
to earn income of other forms (e.g., reported on form 1099) conditional on parental
income. Moreover, it remains possible that black women choose jobs that offer fewer
amenities in exchange for greater compensation within a given occupation. Hence,
we cannot be certain that there is no difference in labor market opportunities
for black and white women conditional on parental income; however, the data do
strongly suggest that the black-white gap in opportunities is much larger for men
than women.
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 743

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FIGURE VI
Black-White Gaps in Wage Rates, Hours, and Employment, by Gender
This figure shows the relationship between children’s employment outcomes and
their parents’ household income, by race and gender. All children’s outcomes in
this figure are obtained from the American Community Survey and all panels
include only children observed in the 2005–2015 ACS at age 30 or older. Panels
A and B plot mean wage ranks versus parental household income percentile, by
race and gender. Panels C and D replicate A and B using mean weekly hours of
work as the outcome, and Panels E and F use annual employment rates as the
outcome. Wages are computed as self-reported annual earnings divided by total
hours of work; they are missing for those who do not work. We convert wages to
percentile ranks by ranking individuals relative to others in the same birth cohort
who received the ACS survey in the same year. Hours of work are defined as total
annual hours of work divided by 51 and are coded as 0 for those who do not work.
744 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

FIGURE VI (Continued). Employment is defined as having positive hours of work

in the past 12 months. To protect confidentiality, bins in which there are fewer
than 10 children who are employed or not employed are suppressed in Panels E

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and F. In each figure, the best-fit lines are estimated using OLS regressions on the
binned series. We report white-black differences based on the best-fit lines at the
25th and 75th parent income percentiles.

potential wage rates but a high marginal cost of labor. Although

there is certainly scope for selection bias of this form, differences
in potential wages for nonworking women are unlikely to overturn
the conclusion that the intergenerational gap in labor market op-
portunities is significantly smaller for women than men, for two
reasons.
First, even among women born to high-income parents—for
whom employment rates are around 90%—wages are very similar
for blacks and whites. Second, we continue to find smaller inter-
generational gaps for women and large intergenerational gaps
for men for outcomes that are observed for everyone, such as
educational attainment. Among children with parents at the 25th
percentile, the black-white gap in high school completion rates
is 3.5 percentage points for women versus 8.3 percentage points
for men (Figure VII, Panels A and B). The corresponding gaps in
college attendance rates are 2.8 percentage points for women and
6.5 percentage points for men (Figure VII, Panels C and D).17 It is
particularly noteworthy that high school completion and college
attendance rates are uniformly higher for black women than for
white men across the parental income distribution.
The gender difference in racial disparities is perhaps most
stark in incarceration (Steffensmeier, Ulmer, and Kramer 1998).
Figure VII, Panel E shows that 21% of black males born to par-
ents in the lowest-income (bottom 1%) families were incarcerated
on April 1, 2010 (when they are between the ages of 27 and 32).
In contrast, 6.4% of white males born to parents with comparable
income were incarcerated. As parental income rises, the incar-
ceration rates decline for both white and black males. But there
are substantial disparities even at the top of the parental income
distribution. Among children with parents in the top 1%, only

17. We also find larger gaps for men than women when examining the asso-
ciation between children’s education and parents’ education (rather than income).
See the Online Data Tables for intergenerational transition matrices of education
by race and gender.
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 745

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FIGURE VII
Black-White Gaps in Educational Attainment and Incarceration, by Gender
Panels A–D show the relationship between children’s educational attainment
and their parents’ household income, by race and gender. Data on educational
attainment is obtained from the American Community Survey. Panels A and B plot
the fraction of children who complete high school by parental income percentile, by
race and gender. Panels C and D replicate Panels A and B using college attendance
as the outcome. Panels A and B include only children observed in the 2005–2015
ACS at age 19 or older, while Panels C and D include those observed at age 20 or
older. High school completion is defined as having a high school diploma or GED.
College attendance is defined as having obtained “at least some college credit.”
Panels E and F plot incarceration rates versus parent income percentile, by race
and gender. Incarceration is defined as being incarcerated on April 1, 2010, using
746 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

FIGURE VII (Continued). data from the 2010 Census short form. The children
in our sample are between the ages of 27 and 32 at that point. The best-fit lines
in Panels A–D are estimated using OLS regressions on the binned series. We

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report white-black differences based on the best-fit lines (in Panels A–D) and
based directly on the nonparametric estimates (in Panel F) at the 25th and 75th
parent income percentiles. To protect confidentiality, bins in which there are fewer
than 10 children who either exhibit the outcome (e.g., college attendance) or do
not exhibit the outcome are suppressed.

0.2% of white males were incarcerated, whereas 2.2% of black

males were incarcerated—the same rate as for white boys who
grew up in families at the 34th percentile of the parental income
distribution. In contrast, incarceration rates are very low for both
black and white females across the parental income distribution
(Figure VII, Panel F). These findings reinforce the view that the
processes that generate racial disparities differ substantially by
gender.
Although there are large differences in incarceration rates
between black and white men, incarceration itself is unlikely to
mechanically explain the black-white gaps in income for men doc-
umented in Figure V, Panel A. That is, the black-white inter-
generational gap would be sizable even if we exclude individuals
who are incarcerated at the point at which we measure their in-
come (and hence have near-zero income). One way to see this is
that the income gap remains substantial even among children
in the highest-income families, for whom incarceration rates are
small in absolute terms: 2.2% of black men born to parents in the
top 1% are incarcerated, yet their individual earnings ranks are
10.2 percentiles below those of white men. Incarceration also can-
not directly explain the sharp disparities observed in outcomes
at younger ages, such as high school dropout rates. Moreover, in-
carcerated individuals have low levels of earnings even prior to
incarceration (Looney and Turner 2017).18
We conclude based on the preceding analysis that the black-
white intergenerational gap in individual income is substantial for
men, but quite small for women. It is important to note, however,
that this finding does not imply that the unconditional black-white

18. Our point here is simply that incarceration does not mechanically account
for the black-white gap in earnings outcomes by taking people out of the labor
force. Of course, high rates of incarceration could influence intergenerational gaps
through broader channels, for example, by changing ex ante investment in human
capital, by changing norms, or by reducing the presence of black fathers in a
community.
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 747

gap in women’s individual incomes will vanish with time. This is

because black women continue to have substantially lower levels
of household income than white women, both because they are less

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likely to be married and because black men earn less than white
men (Online Appendix Figure V). As a result, black girls grow up
in lower-income households than white girls in each generation,
leading to a persistent racial disparity in individual income for
women even in the absence of an intergenerational gap in their
individual incomes.
Nevertheless, the key to closing income disparities for both
black and white women is to close intergenerational gaps in in-
come between black and white men. We establish this result for-
mally in Online Appendix E by extending the model in Section II
to allow men’s and women’s individual income ranks to depend
on the individual income ranks of both men and women in the
previous generation. The model predicts that in the absence of
intergenerational gaps for women, the steady-state gap for both
women and men is proportional to the intergenerational gap in
individual incomes for men. We focus on understanding the deter-
minants of intergenerational gaps between black and white men
in the rest of the article.

VI. FAMILY-LEVEL FACTORS

In this section, we ask whether other factors that vary across
black and white families beyond parental income can explain in-
tergenerational gaps in income between black and white men. We
consider four family-level factors that have received attention in
the previous literature, summarized in Online Appendix Table I:
parental marital status, parental education, parental wealth, and
differences in ability.
We study the role of parental characteristics by estimating
regressions on the subsample of black and white children of the
form:

(5) yi,c = a + bp yi, p + bw whitei + bwpwhitei · yi, p + cXi + ei ,

where yi, c is the child’s individual income rank, yi, p is the parent’s
household income rank, whitei is an indicator for the child being
white, and Xi is a covariate such as parental education. In this
specification, the intergenerational gap in income between blacks
and whites at a given parental income rank p̄, controlling for the
748 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

effect of Xi , is  p̄|X = bw + bwp p̄. Our goal is to assess how  p̄|X

changes as we control for various factors X.
In Figure VIII, we show how  p̄|X changes as we control for

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various factors X. Panel A considers the black-white gap for chil-
dren growing up in low-income ( p̄ = 25) families, while Panel B
considers the gap for those growing up in high-income ( p̄ = 75)
families. As a reference, the first two bars in the panels report the
unconditional difference in white and black children’s mean indi-
vidual income ranks, without controlling for parental income or
any other covariate. This unconditional gap is 17.6 percentiles for
males and 4.8 percentiles for females. The second set of bars report
estimates of  p̄ when no controls Xi are included. These estimates
correspond to the difference between the black and white series
in Figure IV, Panel B at the 25th and 75th percentiles (under a
linear approximation for both series).
The rest of the bars in Figure VIII, Panels A and B show
how these intergenerational gaps change with the introduction of
additional controls, Xi . One prominent hypothesis is that black
children have poorer outcomes because they are more likely to
grow up in single parent families (Lundberg 2017), an effect that
may be especially pronounced for boys (Autor et al. 2019). The
third set of bars in Figure VIII, Panels A and B show that control-
ling for parental marital status in equation (5) has a small effect
on the intergenerational gap in income. At the 25th percentile,
the intergenerational gap for men falls from 10 to 9.3 percentiles;
at the 75th percentile, it falls from 11.7 to 11.4 percentiles.19
Next we include indicators for parents’ highest level of edu-
cational attainment in equation (5) (see Online Appendix C for
details on how educational attainment is defined). Controlling for
parental education in addition to marital status reduces the gap
for men to 9.1 percentiles at p̄ = 25; at p̄ = 75, the gap remains
unchanged at 11.4 percentiles.

19. In Online Appendix Figures VIa and b, we relax the parametric assump-
tion implicit in equation (5) that marital status has an additive effect on children’s
outcomes by replicating Figure V, Panel A separately for boys in single- and two-
parent families. The black-white intergenerational gaps remain similar to the
estimates obtained from equation (5) in both of these groups. Controlling for mar-
ital status has a larger effect when we do not control for parent income, reducing
the unconditional black-white gap from 17.6 to 13.3 percentiles (Online Appendix
Figure VII), consistent with Autor et al. (2019). This is because having two parents
in the household is associated with a higher level of household income. We focus
here on how controls affect the intergenerational gap (i.e., the gap conditional on
parental income) because that is the parameter relevant for the dynamics of racial
disparities across generations.
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 749

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FIGURE VIII
Effects of Family- and Neighborhood-Level Factors on the Black-White Income
Gap
These figures show how the black-white gap in children’s individual income
ranks changes as we control for family- and neighborhood-level factors. The bars
on the left in each pair report the black-white gap in individual income ranks
for boys, while the bars on the right report the same statistics for girls. The first
set of bars shows the unconditional black-white gap in mean individual income
ranks. The second set of bars reports  p̄ , the intergenerational gap in mean income
ranks at percentile p̄ of the parental income distribution, estimated by regressing
children’s income ranks on their parents’ ranks, an indicator for being white,
and the interaction of these variables. Panel A reports estimates for p̄ = 25, and
Panel B reports estimates for p̄ = 75. The next three sets of bars report estimates
of  p̄ as we include additional family-level controls in the regression: parental
marital status, education, and wealth proxies. Parental marital status is measured
based on whether the primary tax filer who first claims the child as a dependent
is married. We control for parental education using indicator variables for the
highest level of education parents have completed using data from the ACS and
the 2000 Census long form, prioritizing information from the ACS if both sources
are available. We define seven categories of parental education: no school, less
than high school, high school degree, college no degree, associate degree, bachelor
degree, and graduate degree. We use the mother’s education if available; if not,
we use the father’s education. We use indicators for home ownership and the
number of vehicles owned and linear controls for monthly mortgage payments
750 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

FIGURE VIII (Continued). and home value as wealth proxies. These variables
are also obtained from the 2000 Census long form and ACS, again prioritizing
the mother’s data. The sixth set of bars controls for total wealth (including the

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component not captured by the Census/ACS wealth proxies) by using information
from the SCF, following the method described in Online Appendix F. The seventh
set of bars includes fixed effects for the tract in which the child grew up (defined
as the first nonmissing tract of their parents). The eighth set of bars replicates the
seventh, replacing the Census tract fixed effects with Census block fixed effects.
The estimates reported in the fourth, fifth, and sixth pairs of bars use the subsam-
ple for which the relevant controls are available from the 2000 Census and ACS,
while the other estimates use the full analysis sample.

Finally, we evaluate whether differences in parental wealth

can explain the black-white gap in intergenerational mobility.
Black families have much lower levels of wealth than white fam-
ilies, even conditional on income (Oliver and Shapiro 1995). Un-
fortunately, we do not observe household wealth in our data; we
only observe various proxies for wealth such as home ownership,
monthly mortgage payments, home value, and the number of
vehicles. Controlling for these proxies reduces the black-white
intergenerational income gap modestly for males, from 9.1 to 8.4
percentiles at p̄ = 25.20
To estimate how much further the gap would narrow if we
were to control for total wealth, we use separate data from the
SCF to assess how much of the black-white gap in total wealth
(conditional on parental income) is captured by the proxies that
we observe in the ACS. Our proxies account for about two-thirds
of the black-white wealth gap: controlling for the proxies re-
duces the estimated black-white wealth gap by 64%. In Online
Appendix F, we show that we can use this estimate to infer
the black-white intergenerational income gap controlling for total
wealth under the assumption that children’s outcomes are inde-
pendent of the ACS wealth proxies conditional on total wealth (or,
equivalently, that the components of wealth observed in the ACS
have the same effects on children’s outcomes as the unobserved
components). Intuitively, we simply inflate the reduction in the ob-
served black-white intergenerational gap when we control for the
ACS wealth proxies by the portion of the wealth gap accounted for
by those proxies to estimate how much the black-white gap would
fall if we were to control for total wealth.

20. Controlling nonparametrically for wealth, for example, by conditioning on

the subset of families who do not own houses, also yields similar results (Online
Appendix Figure VIc).
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 751

The adjustment for imperfect measurement of wealth in the

ACS reduces the black-white income gap given parents at the 25th
percentile to 8.0 percentiles, a 0.4 percentile reduction relative to

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the estimate that controls only for the ACS wealth proxies. In-
tuitively, this is because low-income families hold the majority of
their wealth in the illiquid assets that are captured in the ACS.
The correction for imperfect measurement of wealth has a slightly
larger effect at the 75th percentile of the national income distri-
bution, reducing the estimated black-white gap from 11 to 10.2
percentiles. We conclude based on this analysis that differences
in wealth between black and white families are unlikely to explain
their starkly different rates of intergenerational mobility.
The last family-level explanation we evaluate is the hypoth-
esis that there are genetic differences in cognitive ability by race.
Because we do not have measures of innate ability in our data,
we cannot use the same approach as above to evaluate this hy-
pothesis. However, two pieces of evidence suggest that differences
in ability are unlikely to explain the intergenerational gaps we
document. First, the prior literature suggests no ex ante bio-
logical reason that racial differences in cognitive ability would
vary by gender (Rushton and Jensen 2005). Hence, our find-
ing that black-white intergenerational gaps vary so sharply by
gender casts doubt on ability as an explanation for the gaps we
observe.
Second, most prior arguments for the ability hypothesis rest
on the large gaps observed between black and white children on
standardized tests (e.g., Hernstein and Murray 1994). However,
black-white test score gaps do not vary significantly by gender.
Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show
that the black-white gap in test scores at age 9 for low-income
(free- or reduced-price lunch–eligible) children is 0.48 std. dev.
for boys versus 0.44 std. dev. for girls (Online Appendix Figure
VIII). The fact that these test score gaps are not aligned with the
earnings gaps across gender casts further doubt on the view that
differences in cognitive ability, as measured by test scores, explain
black-white gaps in earnings outcomes.21

21. An alternative explanation of the test score gaps is that blacks under-
perform on standardized tests relative to whites because of inherent biases in
standardized tests or stereotype threat (Steele and Aronson 1995; Jencks and
Phillips 1998).
752 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

In summary, the family-level factors most commonly dis-

cussed in prior work explain very little of the differences in in-
tergenerational mobility between black and white men.22

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VII. NEIGHBORHOOD-LEVEL FACTORS
In this section, we use variation across neighborhoods as a
lens to study how environmental factors affect intergenerational
mobility for black and white men. Because neighborhoods vary
on many dimensions that can affect individuals’ outcomes—from
the quality of local schools to the availability of jobs to the degree
of racial bias—studying differences in outcomes across neighbor-
hoods is a fruitful way to learn about the effects of environmental
factors (e.g., Wilson 1987; Cutler and Glaeser 1997; Sampson,
Morenoff, and Gannon-Rowley 2002; Sharkey and Faber 2014).
We organize our analysis into four sections. First, we charac-
terize broad regional variation in black-white intergenerational
gaps across CZs, which are aggregations of counties that are com-
monly used as a definition of local labor markets. Since blacks and
whites often live in different parts of a given CZ, we next exam-
ine variation in outcomes by race at much finer geographies, by
Census tract and block. Having characterized the observational
variation in outcomes across neighborhoods, in the third subsec-
tion, we study the outcomes of children whose families move across
areas to determine whether the neighborhood-level differences in
black-white gaps that we document are driven by causal effects
of environment or sorting. Finally, we compare the types of neigh-
borhoods in which black and white children grow up to evaluate
the extent to which changes in neighborhood environments could
close the black-white gap.
Throughout this section, we focus on characterizing how the
neighborhoods in which children grow up affect their outcomes,
which may differ from the neighborhoods in which they live as
adults. We focus on childhood neighborhoods because of prior ev-
idence that rates of intergenerational mobility depend on where
children grow up rather than where they live as adults (Chetty,
Hendren, and Katz 2016; Chetty and Hendren 2018a).

22. As with the black-white gap, we find that controlling for other family-
level factors has little effect on intergenerational gaps between Hispanics, Asians,
American Indians, and whites (Online Appendix Figure IX).
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 753

VII.A. Variation across CZs

We characterize black-white intergenerational gaps across
CZs by assigning children to CZs based on where they grow up.

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Chetty and Hendren (2018a) show that the CZ in which one grows
up has causal effects on earnings and other outcomes in adulthood
until approximately age 23. We therefore assign children to CZs
in proportion to the amount of time they spend below age 23 in
each CZ over the years observed in our sample.23
We characterize the mean income ranks of children of race r
who grow up in CZ c conditional on their parents’ income ranks
using the linear specification in equation (1).24 We regress chil-
dren’s individual income ranks in the national income distribution
on their parent’s household income ranks in the national income
distribution:

(6) yi,c = αrc + βrc yi, p + i ,

weighting by the number of years that child i is observed below age

23 in CZ c. This regression yields estimates of absolute mobility
for children with parents at p = 0 (αrc ) and relative mobility βrc , for
each CZ, c. We combine these estimates to report levels of absolute
mobility at two parent income levels: p = 25 (corresponding to
the outcomes of children of below-median-income parents) and
p = 75 (above-median-income parents). We focus primarily on the
estimates at p = 25 in the main text because most black children
presently grow up in relatively low-income families, but we show
that results are analogous at p = 75 in the Online Appendix.
Figure IX maps the mean individual rank of male children
with parents at the 25th percentile of the national household

23. These “exposure-weighted” estimates could yield biased estimates of the

mean outcomes of children who grow up in a single CZ from birth because they
combine the causal effects of multiple areas into a single area’s estimate. Restrict-
ing the sample to children who never move across areas yields similar results
at the CZ level, but yields much less precise estimates when we zoom in to the
Census tract level below because few children stay in a single tract for their entire
childhood. Fortunately, Chetty et al. (2018, Section III) show that the exposure-
weighted estimates are likely to have a correlation above 0.95 with the mean
outcomes one would observe if children did not move across areas at all, even at
the Census tract level, because children who move tend to move to similar areas.
We therefore interpret our estimates as good predictions of the outcomes of a child
who grows up in a given area from birth.
24. Chetty et al. (2014a) show that the relationship between children’s mean
ranks and their parents’ ranks is approximately linear in all CZs, and we have
754 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

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FIGURE IX
The Geography of Upward Mobility in the United States, by Race
These figures present maps of upward mobility by commuting zone (CZ) for
white male children (Panel A) and black male children (Panel B). All figures are
based on the same sample and income definitions as in Figure III. To construct
upward mobility for a given race-gender group in CZ c, we first regress children’s
individual income ranks on a constant and parent income rank, weighting by the
number of years that each child is observed below age 23 in CZ c. We define upward
mobility as the predicted value from this regression at the 25th percentile of the
parental income distribution. The maps are constructed by grouping the CZ-by-
race observations into 15 quantiles and coloring the areas so that green colors
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 755

FIGURE IX (Continued). represent higher levels of upward mobility, and red colors
correspond to lower mobility. The two maps are on a single color scale to permit
comparisons across racial groups. Estimates for areas with fewer than 20 children

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in our analysis sample or fewer than 500 residents of the children’s racial group
in the 2000 Census are omitted and are shaded with the cross-hatch pattern. The
dollar amounts shown in the legend represent the mean income (in 2015 dollars)
corresponding to the relevant percentile for children in the analysis sample in
2014–2015, when they are between the ages of 31 and 37. Color versions of figure
are available online.

income distribution, ȳ25 cr

= αrc + 0.25βrc , for white and black men.25
The maps for both races are colored on a single scale: dark green
colors represent areas with the highest levels of upward mobility
cr
(i.e., higher ȳ25 ), yellow denotes colors with average levels of up-
ward mobility, and dark red represent areas with the lowest levels
of upward mobility.
The maps reveal three lessons. First, black and white chil-
dren’s rates of upward mobility vary substantially across areas.
The difference between the 90th and 10th percentiles of the
distribution of mean ranks across areas is about 10 percentile
ranks for both white and black men, which is the same as the
average black-white income gap in the United States as a whole.
Second, the areas in which white children have better out-
comes tend to be places where black children have better out-
comes as well, although the patterns are not identical. The cor-
cr
relation between ȳ25 for blacks and whites, weighting by total CZ
population, is 0.5. The geographic patterns, especially for whites,
largely mirror those documented in Chetty et al. (2014a), which
pool across races. For both blacks and whites, rates of upward
mobility are highest for children who grow up in the Great Plains
and the coasts and lowest in parts of the industrial Midwest. For
example, Boston has outcomes toward the top of the within-race
distribution for both white and black men, whereas Knoxville,
Tennessee, has outcomes at the bottom of the distribution for
both groups. One notable exception to this pattern is the South-
east, where whites have especially low rates of upward mobility

verified that this continues to be the case when further disaggregating the data
by race.
25. In Online Appendix Figures X–XIII, we present analogous maps for fe-
males, children growing up in high-income families (p = 75), children of Hispanic
origin, and using household income ranks instead of individual income ranks. The
CZ-level estimates of { ȳcr
p }r,c, p plotted in all of these maps are available in the
Online Data Tables.
756 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

relative to other areas but blacks do not. Among white men with
parents at the 25th percentile of the national income distribution,
those who grew up in Atlanta have a mean rank of 46.6, signif-

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icantly lower than those who grew up in Chicago, who have a
mean rank of 52.6. In contrast, black men who grew up in Atlanta
have a mean rank of 37.7, higher than the mean rank of 36.8 of
low-income black men who grew up in Chicago.
Third, there are substantial differences in black and white
boys’ outcomes within virtually all CZs, for both children with
parents at the 25th and 75th percentiles. Indeed, we find that the
distributions of outcomes for blacks and whites across CZs are
almost nonoverlapping. At the 90th percentile of the (unweighted)
CZ-level distribution, black boys have a mean income rank of 45.1,
which falls at the 16th percentile of the corresponding distribution
for white boys. Black boys do not have the same prospects for
upward mobility as white boys in virtually any CZ.

VII.B. Variation across Census Tracts

Next we zoom in to examine variation across neighborhoods
within CZs by estimating intergenerational mobility at the Cen-
sus tract level. To do so, we estimate the regression specification in
equation (6) for each Census tract separately by race and gender.
Children’s outcomes vary substantially across tracts within CZs.
cr
The population-weighted interdecile (90–10) range of ȳ25 across
tracts within CZs is 7.1 percentiles for black men and 8.4 per-
centiles for white men, about as large as the variation between
CZs discussed above.26 The tract-level estimates can be visual-
ized using the Opportunity Atlas (Chetty et al. 2018), a search-
able, interactive map that is analogous to Figure IX, but at the
tract rather than CZ level. This subsection summarizes the key
properties of the tract-level estimates, focusing in particular on
the black-white gap in upward mobility.

1. Black-White Gaps Persist within Tracts. One of the most

well-known explanations for the black-white gap is residential

cr
26. To adjust for variance due to sampling error in our estimates of ȳ25 when
cr
computing this interdecile range, we first estimate the signal variance of ȳ25 as the
raw variance of the tract-level estimates minus the noise variance. We estimate
the noise variance as the mean of the square of the standard errors obtained from
the regression in equation (6). We then use a normal approximation to estimate
the interdecile range by multiplying the signal std. dev. by 2.56.
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 757

segregation: blacks and whites may have different outcomes be-

cause they tend to live in different neighborhoods (e.g., Massey
and Denton 1993). To test this hypothesis, we include Census

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tract fixed effects in equation (5), effectively comparing the out-
comes of children raised in the same neighborhood.27 Figure VIII,
Panel A shows that including tract fixed effects reduces the black-
white individual income gap among boys with parents at the 25th
percentile (p = 25) from 10.0 percentiles to 7.7 percentiles. Indeed,
even when we compare children who grow up on the same Census
blocks (which contain 50 people on average) by adding block fixed
effects, the intergenerational gap for boys remains at 7 percentiles
at p = 25 and 7.9 percentiles at p = 75. In short, the vast major-
ity of the black-white gap persists even among boys growing up
in families with comparable incomes in the same neighborhood;
differences in neighborhood quality explain at most 30% of the
black-white intergenerational gap.28
Online Appendix Figure XIVa illustrates why this is the
case by presenting a histogram of the intergenerational black-
white gap in each tract for boys with parents at the 25th percentile
of the income distribution,  ȳ25bw
= ȳ25
cw
− ȳ25
cb
, weighting by the
number of black men who grew up in each tract. The mean gap
within tracts is 7.5 percentiles. The raw standard deviation of
 ȳ25
bw
is 6.6 percentiles. However, some of this variance is due
to sampling variation resulting from small samples at the tract
level. Subtracting the variance due to sampling error from the
total variance yields an estimated signal standard deviation of
the latent black-white intergenerational gap within tracts of 3.4
percentiles. This noise-corrected standard deviation implies that
among children with parents at the 25th percentile (p = 25), white

27. We use the first observed Census tract for individuals who move across
tracts in childhood. Replicating the analysis on children who remain in the same
tract for several years or their entire childhood yields very similar results.
28. The small reduction in the intergenerational gap does not mean that neigh-
borhoods do not matter for children’s outcomes. Because neighborhood choice itself
is an endogenous variable, one cannot separate the contribution of neighborhoods
from parental income directly in observational data. Indeed, including Census
block fixed effects without controlling for parent income reduces the unconditional
black-white gap for males from 17.6 to 9.8 percentiles, similar to the effect of
controlling for parental income. Intuitively, parent income itself might matter be-
cause it allows parents to buy access to better neighborhoods for their children.
As discussed, we focus on how the gap conditional on parental income changes
when we control for neighborhood fixed effects because that is what matters for
the evolution of racial disparities in the long run.
758 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

boys have higher incomes in adulthood than black boys in 98.7%

of tracts.29
These results imply that reducing residential segregation

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alone may be insufficient to close the black-white gap, since sub-
stantial disparities persist within neighborhoods. Moreover, be-
cause low-income children who live on the same block are likely to
attend the same schools, simply enabling black and white children
to attend the same schools, without creating greater racial inte-
gration within schools or making other changes that have differen-
tial effects by race, is also likely to be insufficient to close the gap.
Although black-white intergenerational gaps exist in vir-
tually every neighborhood in the United States, there is
nevertheless substantial variation in the magnitude of these gaps
across areas, as shown in Online Appendix Figure XIVa. In the
rest of this section, we use this variation across tracts to under-
stand the characteristics of places where black boys have better
outcomes and where there are smaller intergenerational gaps.

2. Black-White Gaps Are Larger in “Good” Neighborhoods.

We begin by analyzing the most commonly used measures
of neighborhood quality in prior work on neighborhoods (e.g.,
Sampson, Morenoff, and Gannon-Rowley 2002). We obtain
data on a variety of proxies for neighborhood quality—such
as poverty rates, test scores, educational attainment of local
residents, housing costs, and family structure—at the tract level
from the publicly available 2000 Census long form and other
sources. Details on sources and definitions of these variables are
in Online Appendix D.
Figure X, Panel A plots the correlation between a selected sub-
set of tract-level characteristics and the mean individual income
ranks of black boys (solid circles) and white boys (open circles)
cr
with parents at the 25th percentile ( ȳ25 ). All of these tract-level
characteristics are defined so that the correlation between the
characteristic and the outcome for white males is positive (e.g.,
we use the share above the poverty line rather than the poverty
rate).

29. At p = 75, white boys have higher incomes in adulthood than black boys
in 98.1% of tracts (Online Appendix Figure XIVb). In contrast, black girls have
higher incomes than white girls in 84% of tracts conditional on having parents at
p = 25 and 69% of tracts at p = 75 (Online Appendix Figure XV).
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 759

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FIGURE X
Correlations between Upward Mobility and Tract-Level Characteristics
Panel A presents tract-level correlations between various characteristics and
upward mobility for black men (hollow circles) and white men (solid circles) with
parents at the 25th percentile of the national income distribution. To construct
upward mobility for a given race-gender group in tract c, we first regress chil-
dren’s individual income ranks on a constant and parent income rank, weighting
by the number of years that each child is observed below age 23 in tract c. We
then define upward mobility as the predicted value from this regression at the
25th percentile of the parental income distribution. Tract-level characteristics are
obtained from the 2000 Census and other sources; see Online Appendix D for
760 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

FIGURE X (Continued). definitions and details. All characteristics are defined

such that correlations with upward mobility are positive. Correlations for black
(white) males are estimated on the set of tracts with more than 20 black (white)

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men in the estimation sample and are weighted by the precision of the upward
mobility estimates. Correlations are adjusted for attenuation bias due to sampling
error in the upward mobility estimates by inflating the raw correlations by the
square root of the reliability of the upward mobility estimates. Panel B presents a
binned scatter plot of the black-white gap in upward mobility (white minus black)
for men with parents at the 25th percentile versus the share of residents in the
tract in which they grew up who were above the poverty line in the 2000 Census. To
construct this figure, we first bin tracts into ventiles (20 groups) based on poverty
rates, weighting each tract by the number of black men in the analysis sample.
We then plot the mean black-white gap versus the mean share above the poverty
line within each bin. The sample for Panel B consists of all tracts with at least 20
white males and 20 black males in our analysis sample.

We find positive correlations between each of these proxies for

neighborhood quality and the outcomes for both white and black
men. For example, black and white boys who grow up in neigh-
borhoods with lower poverty rates, higher test scores, higher me-
dian rents, and more two-parent households tend to have higher
incomes in adulthood. These findings reinforce prior work show-
ing that children who grow up in higher-income areas with more
stable family structure and higher test scores typically have bet-
ter outcomes (e.g., Chetty, Hendren, and Katz 2016; Chetty and
Hendren 2018b).
The correlations in Figure X, Panel A are generally larger
for whites than for blacks. As a result, “good” neighborhoods
tend to have larger intergenerational gaps between blacks and
whites. Figure X, Panel B illustrates this point by presenting
a binned scatter plot of the relationship between the black-
bw
white intergenerational gap for boys ( ȳ25 = ȳ25
cw
− ȳ25
cb
) and the
fraction of residents in the tract who are above the poverty
line. This plot is constructed by dividing the fraction above the
poverty line into 20 equal-sized bins (weighting by the number
of black men) and plotting the means of the x and y variables
within those bins. The mean intergenerational gap increases by
2.5 percentiles when moving from the highest poverty neigh-
borhoods to the lowest poverty neighborhoods. Intuitively, both
black and white boys have higher incomes in low-poverty areas,
but the effect of growing up in a low-poverty area is larger for
whites than blacks. As a result, black-white intergenerational
gaps are larger in low-poverty neighborhoods than in high-poverty
neighborhoods.
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 761

3. Characteristics of Neighborhoods with Smaller Intergener-

ational Gaps. In light of these findings, we investigate whether
there are certain neighborhoods where black boys do well and

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black-white intergenerational gaps are smaller. The tracts where
black men do well are dispersed across the country rather than
concentrated in a particular city or region. For example, black
men have the highest rates of upward mobility in Silver Spring
in the Washington DC metro area as well as parts of Queens in
New York. In these areas, black men growing up in low-income
(p = 25) families have mean income ranks in adulthood above the
50th percentile. Black men have the poorest outcomes in neigh-
borhoods such as Englewood in the South Side of Chicago and
parts of South Los Angeles, where their mean income ranks in
adulthood are around the 30th percentile.
To characterize the features of areas that have good outcomes
for black men, we first establish that the neighborhoods in which
low-income black boys have high rates of upward mobility—which
we define as a mean income rank in adulthood above the national
median—are almost exclusively low-poverty neighborhoods.
Online Appendix Figure XVI establishes this result by present-
ing a binned scatter plot of the fraction of tracts in which ȳ25cb
> 50
versus the share of residents above the poverty line. The subset
of neighborhoods in which the average rank of low-income black
boys is above the 50th percentile almost all have poverty rates
below 10% (demarcated by the dashed line on the figure), which
is approximately the median (population-weighted) poverty rate
across tracts in the United States. We therefore zoom in on areas
with a poverty rate below 10% to identify places where low-income
black boys do well in absolute levels and relative to their white
peers.
In Figure XI, we correlate various tract-level characteristics
with the black-white gap given parents at p = 25 ( ȳ25bw
) to identify
the characteristics of areas with smaller intergenerational gaps.
In addition to the more traditional proxies for neighborhood qual-
ity considered above, we expand the set of tract-level characteris-
tics we consider to include a set of race-specific measures—such
as poverty rates for black and white families—as well as other
variables that have differential effects by race, such as measures
of racial bias. To isolate variables that are uniformly associated
with better outcomes for black boys, we focus on the subset of
characteristics whose correlations with black boys’ outcomes have
the same sign at both the 25th and 75th percentile of the parental
762 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

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FIGURE XI
Correlations between Black-White Gap for Men and Tract-Level Characteristics
This figure shows correlations between selected tract-level characteristics and
the black-white gap in upward mobility (white minus black) for men with parents
at p = 25, limiting the sample to Census tracts with poverty rates below 10% in the
2000 Census. Upward mobility is estimated as described in the notes to Figure X.
Tract-level characteristics are obtained from the 2000 Census and other sources;
see Online Appendix C for definitions and details. All characteristics are defined
such that their correlation with the level of incomes for black men is positive. We
include only characteristics whose correlations with black men’s incomes have the
same sign at both the 25th and 75th percentiles of the parental income distribution
(p = 25 and p = 75). Correlations are weighted by the precision of the estimated
intergenerational gaps and are adjusted for attenuation bias due to sampling
error in the upward mobility estimates by inflating the raw correlations by the
square root of the reliability of the estimated intergenerational gaps. Negative
correlations correspond to smaller magnitudes of intergenerational gaps between
blacks and whites.

income distribution. To simplify exposition, we define all the

neighborhood characteristics so that they are positively correlated
cb
with ȳ25 (e.g., by examining the share above rather than below the
poverty line).30

30. Online Appendix Table XII provides the full set of variables and reports
their correlations with the mean income ranks of low-income white and black
males in low-poverty neighborhoods. Online Appendix Tables XI and XIII report
analogous correlations for the full sample of tracts and for females, respectively.
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 763

Mirroring the pattern documented above, most of the tract-

level characteristics we examine are associated with larger black-
white intergenerational gaps. That is, neighborhood characteris-

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tics associated with better outcomes for black boys are associated
with larger intergenerational gaps relative to whites. However, a
small number of variables are associated with smaller gaps, which
we now investigate in further detail.

4. Father Presence. Among all the characteristics in Figure

XI, the fraction of low-income black fathers present is most pre-
dictive of smaller intergenerational gaps.31 We define father pres-
ence as an indicator for whether the child is claimed by a male
on a tax form in the year he or she is matched to a parent. We
regress this indicator for father presence on parental income rank
for each tract using equation (6) and define black father presence
among low-income families as the prediction for black children at
p = 25.
Figure XII characterizes the association between father pres-
ence and children’s outcomes across tracts. In Panel A, we present
a binned scatter plot of low-income black and white boys’ mean
cb cw
income ranks in adulthood, ȳ25 and ȳ25 , versus black father pres-
ence, among the subset of low-poverty tracts. Consistent with the
correlation in Figure XI, we find a strong positive association be-
tween black father presence and black males’ incomes. In contrast,
we find no association between black father presence and white
males’ outcomes. Because of this differential effect by race, the
black-white intergenerational gap is 6.1 percentiles in tracts with
the highest levels of black father presence, compared with 9.3
percentiles in the tracts with the lowest levels of father presence.
Panel B shows that these differences are even more stark
when we focus on the extensive margin of employment: black
boys’ employment rates (measured as having positive income in
the tax data in either 2014 or 2015) are significantly higher in
tracts with higher levels of black father presence. Among low-
poverty tracts with the highest levels of black father presence, the
black-white gap in employment rates given parents at p = 25 is

31. This pattern holds even when we restrict the sample to children whose
parents are born in the United States or after controlling for the share of black
immigrants at the tract level, allaying the concern that a high rate of black father
presence may simply be acting as a proxy for a community with a large share of
immigrant black families (who have higher rates of upward mobility than natives).
764 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

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FIGURE XII
Black-White Gaps versus Father Presence by Census Tract
These figures present binned scatter plots of various outcomes in adulthood
versus the percentage of black children raised in low-income families whose fathers
are present in their household, by Census tract. We define father presence as an
indicator for whether a child is claimed by a male on a tax form in the year he
or she is matched to a parent. We regress this indicator for father presence on
parental income rank for each tract using equation (6), and define black father
presence among low-income families as the prediction for black children at p =
25. Each figure is constructed by dividing the x variable (father presence) into
50 equal-sized bins and plotting the mean of the y and x variables in each bin,
separately for various subgroups. In Panel A, the y variable is upward mobility,
the predicted individual income rank in adulthood conditional on having parents
at the 25th percentile, estimated as described in the notes to Figure X. In Panels
B and D, the y variable is an indicator for working, where working is defined as
having nonzero individual income in either 2014 or 2015. In Panel C, the y variable
is an indicator for being incarcerated on April 1, 2010. In all panels, we restrict the
sample to tracts with a poverty rate below 10% in the 2000 Census. We also limit
the sample to tracts with at least 20 observations for white and black males in
Panels A, B, and C, and 20 observations for black males and females in Panel D. We
estimate best-fit lines on the plotted points using OLS and report the differences
in the predicted values from these regressions in the 1st and 50th quantile. We
also report the slope coefficients and standard errors (in parentheses).
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 765

4 percentage points, as compared with 9 percentage points in the

nation as a whole. Panel C shows that black boys who grow up
in areas with high father presence are also less likely to be incar-

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cerated. Panel D replicates Panel B, comparing the employment
rates of black boys and girls. Black father presence predicts boys’
employment rates but not girls’ employment rates.32
We probe the robustness of these results in Table II. In col-
umn (1), we regress the predicted income ranks of black males
at p = 25 ( ȳ25
cb
) on low-income black father presence, weighting
by the number of black boys who grow up in each tract. Children
who grow up in a tract with 10 percentage points more low-income
black fathers present have incomes that are 0.5 percentiles higher
on average, consistent with Figure XII, Panel A. Column (2) shows
that the pattern is driven by the presence of low-income black fa-
thers, not white fathers; including both variables in the regression
yields a coefficient of 0.045 (std. err. = 0.0068) on the presence of
low-income black fathers and 0.0077 (std. err. = 0.0076) for white
fathers. Column (3) shows that the results are very similar when
we include state fixed effects.
Columns (4) and (5) show that the association between black
boys’ outcomes and neighborhood-level presence of black fathers
remains strong when we condition on the child’s parents’ marital
status, by restricting the sample either to children raised in a
single parent family (column (4)) or a two-parent family (column
(5)). Hence, the association with father presence is driven by a
characteristic of the neighborhood in which the child grows up
and is not simply a direct effect of the marital status of one’s own
parents, consistent with Sampson (1987).
Next, we investigate whether the association with father
presence is driven by black fathers in particular or the presence of
black men in general. To distinguish father presence from black
male presence, we calculate two measures: the number of low-
income black males in each tract in 2000 in the Decennial Census
and the number of below-median-income black fathers in the tract
in 2000. We divide these counts by the number of black children
in our analysis sample in each tract to obtain a measure of black

32. Symmetrically, the employment rates of low-income white men are pre-
dicted by the fraction of white fathers present and the employment rates of women
are likewise predicted by the fraction of mothers present. But rates of father pres-
ence among whites and rates of mother presence (for both blacks and whites)
are generally quite high, making this a less important factor in explaining the
variance of outcomes for those subgroups than for black men.
 766

TABLE II
ASSOCIATION BETWEEN BLACK FATHER PRESENCE AND BLACK MEN’S UPWARD MOBILITY ACROSS CENSUS TRACTS: OLS ESTIMATES

Baseline Black versus State Children Children Black Gender All Adulthood
white FE with with fathers ratio tracts tract
father fathers two per FE
presence absent parents child
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9)

Low-income black 0.0492 0.0450 0.0501 0.0279 0.0461 0.0806 0.1052

father presence (0.0062) (0.0068) (0.0066) (0.0108) (0.0128) (0.0036) (0.0079)
Low-income white 0.0077
father presence (0.0076)
Low-income black 0.0382 0.0387
father presence in 2000 (0.0043) (0.0043)
Low-income black male −0.0011
filers per child (0.0011)
Low poverty tracts X X X X X X X
State FEs X
Current tract FEs X
THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

Number of tracts 10,582 10,444 10,582 5,159 5,280 10,177 10,177 28,850
Number of individual obs. 193,000

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 TABLE II
(CONTINUED)

Notes. This table presents coefficients from OLS regressions run at the Census tract level, with standard errors reported in parentheses. The dependent variable in all columns is
upward mobility for black males who grow up in a given Census tract. To construct upward mobility in a given tract c, we regress children’s individual income ranks on parent income
rank, weighting by the number of years that each child is observed below age 23 in tract c. We then define upward mobility as the predicted value from this regression at the 25th
percentile of the parental income distribution. The key independent variable in columns (1)–(5) is low-income black father presence. We define father presence as an indicator for
whether a child is claimed by a male on a tax form in the year he is matched to a parent. We regress this indicator for father presence on parental income rank for each tract
using equation (6), and define black father presence among low-income families as the prediction for black children at p = 25. In column (1), we regress upward mobility for black
men on the fraction of low-income black fathers present, weighting by the number of black boys who grow up in each tract and restricting the sample to tracts with a poverty
rate below 10% in the 2000 Census. The coefficient of 0.0492 implies that black boys who grow up in a tract with 10 percentage points more low-income black fathers present
have 0.5 percentiles higher income ranks on average. Column (2) replicates column (1), including a control for low-income white father presence, which is defined analogously to
black father presence. Column (3) adds state fixed effects to the baseline specification in column (1). In column (4), we replicate column (1), but measure upward mobility only
among black boys raised in families without a father present; column (5) conversely measures upward mobility only among black boys raised in two-parent families. Column (6)
replicates column (1), replacing the independent variable with the number of below-median-income black fathers in the Census tract in 2000 divided by the number of children in
our analysis sample, an alternative measure of father presence. Column (7) replicates column (6), adding the total number of low-income black males (not just fathers) per child as
an additional regressor. Column (8) replicates the baseline specification in column (1), but includes all available tracts instead of just low-poverty Census tracts. Finally, column
(9) is analogous to column (8), but includes fixed effects for the tract in which children reside as adults (in 2015). To include these fixed effects, we estimate this specification at the
individual level (unweighted). We restrict the sample to children who grew up in families with parents between the 20th and 30th percentiles of the parental income distribution
and use their individual income rank as the dependent variable. All statistics are cleared under Census DRB release authorization CBDRB-FY18-195.
RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES
767

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768 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

male presence and a comparable measure of black father presence.

Column (6) shows that we continue to find a strong positive as-
sociation between black father presence and black boys’ earnings

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outcomes when we use the count-based measure of black father
presence defined above from the 2000 Census. Column (7) shows
that when we include both black father presence and black male
presence in the regression, black father presence remains just as
predictive as in column (6), whereas black male presence is not
significantly related to black boys’ outcomes. Hence, what matters
is the number of black men involved in raising children in a tract,
not the number of black men overall.
Finally, we test the hypothesis that black boys’ outcomes are
associated with black father presence because they may both be
affected by the same set of policies or shocks that persist over
time in an area (such as high rates of arrests or incarceration).
To do so, we include fixed effects for the tract in which the child
lives as an adult (in 2015), thereby comparing children who grew
up in different areas but currently live in the same place. To
maximize precision, we use the full sample rather than the subset
of low-poverty tracts for this analysis. The association between
black father presence and black boys’ earnings outcomes is strong
whether or not we include adulthood tract fixed effects (column
(8) versus (9)). Hence, what matters is the fraction of low-income
fathers in the tract where the child grows up even holding fixed
where they live as adults, ruling out the possibility that the same
factors that affect black father presence directly affect black boys’
outcomes.
Together, these results show that black father presence is
associated with children’s outcomes in a highly race-by-gender
specific manner. Although we cannot make strong causal claims
based on this correlational evidence, the specificity of this set of
correlations rules out broad mechanisms that would affect both
genders and races (such as differences in the quality of schools).
Instead, it points to channels that affect black boys in particular,
such as mentoring by black male role models in the community
or differences in the treatment of black boys in communities with
high rates of black father presence.

5. Racial Bias. We turn to another set of factors associated

with both better outcomes for black boys and a smaller black-
white intergenerational gap in low-poverty tracts: lower levels of
racial bias among whites. Prior work has shown that exposure
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 769

to racial bias during childhood adversely affects black youth, es-

pecially black boys, in school (e.g., Simpson and Erickson 1983;
Chavous et al. 2008). Here, we investigate whether these effects

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are associated with adverse long-term outcomes.
We consider two measures of racial bias. The first is a mea-
sure of implicit racial bias from Implicit Association Tests (IATs),
which measure the difference in a participant’s ability to match
positive and negative words with black versus white faces (Green-
wald, McGhee, and Schwartz 1998). We obtain mean IAT racial
bias scores for white and black study participants at the county
level from the Race Implicit Association Database.33 The second
measure we use is the Racial Animus Index constructed by
Stephens-Davidowitz (2014). This is a measure of explicit racial
bias, based on the frequency of Google searches for racial epithets
at the media market level, which are aggregations of counties. We
standardize all the racial bias measures used below so that they
have mean 0 and standard deviation 1 across areas (weighting
by the number of black males in our sample), with higher values
representing greater racial bias against blacks.34
Table III characterizes the association between measures
of racial bias and upward mobility across counties and media
markets.35 We restrict the sample to counties or media markets
with poverty rates below 10% and weight the regressions by the
number of black men in the relevant geographic unit. We begin
in column (1) by regressing the mean individual income rank of
cb
black boys raised in low-income families ( ȳ25 ) in each county on the
(standardized) difference between whites’ and blacks’ mean IAT

33. Participation in the IAT (an online test that has been taken by millions
of users) is entirely voluntary. As a result, there may be selection biases induced
by differences in who chooses to take the test across areas. Although we cannot
definitively rule out such biases, the rate of participation in the IAT is not sig-
nificantly correlated with the black-white intergenerational gap, providing some
reassurance in using these measures as a rough proxy for average racial attitudes
in an area.
34. We did not include these racial bias measures in Figure XI because they
are not available at the Census tract level. Nevertheless, among all the variables
we consider (at both the tract level and broader geographies) that are not asso-
ciated with larger black-white gaps, the racial bias measures have the strongest
correlations with black boys’ income ranks at both p = 25 and p = 75 within
low-poverty areas (Online Appendix Table XII).
35. Online Appendix Table XIV replicates the analysis in Table III using
employment and incarceration among black males as the dependent variables,
showing similar patterns.
 TABLE III
770
ASSOCIATION BETWEEN RACIAL BIAS AND UPWARD MOBILITY ACROSS COUNTIES AND MEDIA MARKETS: OLS REGRESSION ESTIMATES

Sample Black Black Black Black White Black Black White

male male male female male male female male
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8)

Difference in IAT −0.0081 −0.0060 −0.0082 −0.0097

(0.0024) (0.0019) (0.0029) (0.0025)
IAT score for whites −0.0080
(0.0023)
IAT score for blacks 0.0047
(0.0023)
Racial Animus Index −0.0263 −0.0191 −0.0203
(0.0056) (0.0080) (0.0042)
State FEs X
Unit of analysis Counties Counties Counties Counties Counties Media Media Media
markets markets markets
Number of counties/ 340 340 340 325 340 28 27 28
media markets

Notes. This table presents coefficients from OLS regressions with standard errors reported in parentheses. Columns (1)–(5) examine the association between measures of implicit
racial bias and children’s income ranks in adulthood across counties. The implicit racial bias measures are based on mean scores on implicit association tests (IATs) for white
and black study participants by county, obtained from the Race Implicit Association Database. All racial bias measures used in this table are standardized so that they have
mean 0 and standard deviation 1 across areas (weighting by the number of black males in our sample), with higher values representing greater racial bias against blacks. The
dependent variable in columns (1)–(3) is the predicted income rank for black men who grew up in low-income (25th percentile) families in a given county, constructed by taking a
THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

population-weighted average of the tract-level estimates of upward mobility described in the notes to Table II. Column (1) regresses this measure on the standardized difference in
IAT scores for white versus black respondents (whites’ IAT minus blacks’ IAT). Column (2) includes separate regressors for black and white respondents’ IAT scores. Column (3)
adds state fixed effects to the specification in column (1). Column (4) replaces the dependent variable with the predicted individual income rank for black females with parents at
the 25th percentile instead of black males. Column (5) replaces the dependent variable with the predicted individual income rank for white males at the 25th percentile. Columns
(6)–(8) present estimates from regressions using a standardized version of the Racial Animus measure constructed by Stephens-Davidowitz (2014) at the media market level as
the independent variable. These columns use the same dependent variables as columns (3)–(5) aggregated to the media market level. We limit the sample to counties or media
markets with poverty rates below 10% in the 2000 Census in all specifications and weight the regressions by the number of black men in the relevant geographic unit. All statistics
are cleared under Census DRB release authorization CBDRB-FY18-195.

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 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 771

scores. In counties with a one std. dev. higher level of racial bias
against blacks among whites, black men grow up to have mean
income ranks that are 0.8 percentiles lower. This coefficient im-

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plies that the difference in black boys’ incomes between the least
(bottom 5%) and most (top 5%) racially biased counties exceeds
4 percentiles. In column (2), we regress black boys’ mean income
ranks on whites’ and blacks’ IAT scores separately. As one might
expect, the negative correlation is driven entirely by variation in
the degree of racial bias among whites. Column (3) shows that
results remain similar when we include state fixed effects, show-
ing that the pattern is not just driven by differences across regions.
Column (4) shows that in contrast to the pattern
for father presence, correlations with racial bias are not
gender-specific: black females also have lower incomes in places
that are more racially biased against blacks. Perhaps more sur-
prisingly, column (5) shows that low-income white males also have
lower incomes if they grow up in areas with greater racial bias
against blacks. One potential explanation for this association is
that implicit racial bias is correlated with other forms of bias that
adversely affect low-income white men.36
The patterns are very similar when we use the Racial Animus
Index to proxy for racial bias. Black boys who grow up in low-
income (p = 25) families in media markets with greater racial
animus have lower incomes in adulthood (column (6)). As with
the IAT results, these associations are not gender- or race-specific:
low-income black women and white men who grow up in areas
with more explicit racial animus have lower incomes (columns (7)
and (8)).

VII.C. Causal Effects of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational

Gaps
The neighborhood-level variation in black-white intergener-
ational gaps documented above could be driven by two very dif-
ferent sources. One possibility is that neighborhoods have causal
effects on children’s outcomes: that is, moving a given child to a
different neighborhood would change his outcomes. Another pos-
sibility is that the geographic variation is due to unobserved dif-
ferences in the types of people living in each area. We assess
the relative importance of these two explanations by studying

36. An alternative explanation is reverse causality: whites may be more biased

in areas with lower earnings outcomes. A third possibility is that racial bias is
correlated with other latent factors that drive these correlations.
772 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

how the outcomes of children who move across areas vary with
the age at which they move. Chetty and Hendren (2018a) use
this timing-of-move research design to establish that neighbor-

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hoods have causal effects on children’s outcomes pooling all racial
groups; here, we use the same design to identify the causal effects
of areas on racial disparities by showing that neighborhoods have
race-specific causal effects.

1. Empirical Specification. We study the outcomes of chil-

dren who move across CZs exactly once during their childhood
in our primary analysis sample, which we extend to cover the
1978–1985 cohorts to measure moves at earlier ages (see Online
Appendix G for details). We focus on CZ-level variation (rather
than finer geographies) because the larger sample sizes at the
CZ level allow us to generate precise estimates of the outcomes of
people who grow up in each area, which is essential for identifying
race-specific causal effects.
Let i index children, pi denote their parental income ranks,
and ri denote their racial groups. In the sample of one-time
movers, let mi denote the age at which child i moves from origin
CZ o to destination CZ d. Let ȳrpls denote the exposure-weighted
outcome of yi, c for children of race r in birth cohort s who grew
up in location l with parental household income rank p, estimated
using the specification in equation (6).37 Let rodps = ȳrpds − ȳrpos de-
note the predicted difference in income ranks in the destination
versus origin CZ for children in cohort s.
We regress the income rank of children who move (yi, c ) on
the measures of origin and destination quality interacted with
age-at-move fixed effects:


1985 
28
yi,c = I(si = s)(φs1 + φs2 ȳrpos ) + I(mi = m)(ζm1 + ζm2 yi, p)
s=1978 m=6


28
(7) + bm I(mi = m)rodps + εi ,
m=6

37. We do not include one-time movers when constructing these exposure-

weighted outcomes to ensure that a child’s own outcome does not enter our defini-
tion of neighborhood quality; see Online Appendix G for details.
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 773

where φs1 is a cohort-specific intercept, φs2 ȳpos is a cohort-specific

control for the average exposure-weighted outcome in the origin,
ζm1 is an age-at-move fixed effect, and ζm2 pi is an interaction of

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the age-at-move fixed effects with parental income rank. The key
parameters of interest are the bm coefficients, which capture how
children’s outcomes vary with the age at which they move to an
area with higher or lower predicted earnings.

2. Identification Assumption. We can interpret differences in

the coefficients bm , for example, bm − bm + 1 , as the causal effect
of exposure to a better area (i.e., an area with higher observed
incomes) under the assumption that the potential outcomes of
children who move to better versus worse areas do not vary with
the age at which they move. Chetty and Hendren (2018a) present
a series of tests supporting this orthogonality condition: control-
ling for unobserved heterogeneity across families using sibling
comparisons in models with family fixed effects; implementing a
set of placebo tests exploiting heterogeneity in predicted causal
effects across subgroups; and validating the results using experi-
mental designs, for example, from the Moving to Opportunity Ex-
periment (Chetty, Hendren, and Katz 2016). Furthermore, Chetty
and Hendren (2018a) provide evidence that estimates of place ef-
fects among movers are externally valid to the broader population
because they find similar results among those who self-select to
move compared with families displaced by idiosyncratic events,
such as hurricanes. Building on these results, we take the valid-
ity of the research design as given here and use it to explore racial
heterogeneity in the causal effects of neighborhoods.

3. Results. Figure XIII, Panels A and B plot the coefficients

{bm } in equation (7) using individual income ranks at age 30 for
black and white males, respectively. The bm coefficients decline
until approximately age 23, after which the coefficients are flat.
Under the identification assumption described above, this result
implies that neighborhoods have causal effects on children’s out-
comes in proportion to childhood exposure prior to age 23. We esti-
mate that every year of childhood a black boy grows up in a place
where black boys grow up to have 1 percentile higher incomes
increases his own income by 0.027 percentiles. The corresponding
774 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

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FIGURE XIII
Childhood Exposure Effects on Income and Incarceration in Adulthood
These figures show estimates of childhood exposure effects on income and in-
carceration in adulthood. Panels A and B plot estimates of the coefficients {bm }
versus the child’s age when his parents move (m) using the regression specification
in equation (7) with individual income rank at age 30 as the dependent variable.
The coefficients bm can be interpreted as how children’s outcomes change when
they move at age m to a CZ with a 1 percentile higher predicted individual income
rank in adulthood for children of the same race, gender, and parental income level.
Predicted income ranks are estimated using the outcomes of children in the same
race-gender subgroup and parental income level, excluding one-time movers. The
estimation sample in Panels A and B consists of male children born between 1978
and 1985 whose parents move exactly once across CZs in our sample window. Panel
A considers black men; Panel B considers white men. Panels C and D replicate A
and B, changing the dependent variable to an indicator for being incarcerated on
April 1, 2010, and the key independent variables to predicted incarceration rates
instead of predicted income ranks. The estimation sample in these panels consists
of male children born between 1978 and 1986. The dashed vertical lines separate
the data into two groups: age at move m  23 and m > 23. Best-fit lines are esti-
mated using unweighted OLS regressions of the {bm } coefficients on m separately
for m  23 and m > 23. The slopes of these regression lines are reported along
with standard errors (in parentheses) on the left side of each panel for m  23 and
on the right side for m > 23. The magnitudes of the slopes for m  23 represent
estimates of annual childhood exposure effects. The slopes reported differ slightly
from Online Appendix Table XV because they are estimated from a regression on
the coefficients, bm , rather than a linear parameterization in the individual-level
data.
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 775

estimate for white males is 0.026 per year of exposure.38 Extrap-

olating over 20 years of childhood exposure, this estimate implies
that children who move at birth to an area where we observe 1

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percentile higher incomes for children of their race would pick
up about 50% of that effect themselves through a causal effect of
place.
Figure XIII, Panels C and D replicate Panels A and B us-
ing incarceration as the dependent variable and race-specific
incarceration rates for ȳrpls and rodps in equation (7). Black boys
are 0.033 percentage points more likely to be incarcerated for
every year of childhood exposure to a place with 1 percentage
point higher incarceration rates for black males. We find a slightly
smaller exposure effect of 0.025 for white males.
In Online Appendix Table XV, we present a series of regres-
sion estimates that consider alternative specifications and out-
comes to assess the robustness of the results in Figure XIII. We
find that the estimated exposure effects are very similar to those
in our baseline specifications (see Online Appendix G for details).
In addition, we show that places have causal effects not just on
the level of outcomes but also on the gap in outcomes across races.
In particular, moving one year later in childhood to an area where
black boys have 1 percentile higher incomes in adulthood reduces
a black boy’s income rank by −0.029 (std. err. = 0.004). In contrast,
the corresponding coefficient on the change in predicted income
ranks for white men is −0.003 (std. err. = 0.004), controlling for
the predicted income rank of black men. Hence, moving to an area
with better outcomes for white boys has essentially no effect on
a black boy’s outcomes conditional on the outcomes of black boys
who grow up in that area. The converse is true for white men.
These results show that moving to an area with a larger observed
black-white intergenerational gap at an earlier age in childhood
results in larger intergenerational gaps in adulthood.
We conclude that much of the observational variation in
black-white intergenerational gaps documented here reflects the

38. These estimates are slightly smaller than those reported in Chetty and
Hendren (2018a) when pooling racial groups because they were only able to analyze
moves after age nine, whereas here we include moves at earlier ages. As is evident
from Figure XIII, the bm coefficients decline more rapidly in adolescence than at
earlier ages, which is why expanding the age window to earlier ages leads to a
smaller average exposure effect estimate.
776 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

causal effects of childhood environment rather than selection.39 In

establishing the importance of environmental factors, this finding
rejects the hypothesis that racial gaps are driven entirely by

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differences in immutable traits such as innate ability. The finding
that neighborhood effects on racial gaps are proportional to child-
hood exposure is consistent with prior evidence documenting the
emergence of racial gaps in achievement in childhood (Fryer and
Levitt 2004) and the importance of pre–labor-market measures
in explaining racial gaps in labor market outcomes (Neal and
Johnson 1996; Altonji and Blank 1999; Fryer 2010). It is also
consistent with evidence from the Moving to Opportunity exper-
iment showing that moving to a low-poverty neighborhood as a
young child significantly increases income for both blacks and
whites, whereas moving as an adult does not (Chetty, Hendren,
and Katz 2016).

VII.D. Summary: Environment Matters, but Good Environments

Are Rare
The analysis in this section has shown that childhood
environment has significant causal effects on black-white
intergenerational gaps. Black boys do especially well in low-
poverty neighborhoods with a large fraction of fathers at home
in black families and low levels of racial bias among whites. How-
ever, very few black boys grow up in such areas: 4.2% of black
children currently grow up in Census tracts with a poverty rate
below 10 percent and more than half of black fathers present
(Figure XIV).40 In contrast, 62.5% of white children grow up in
low-poverty areas with more than half of white fathers present.
These disparities in the environments in which black and white
children are raised help explain why we observe significant

39. This is true not just on average but also in the tails of the distribution:
moves earlier in childhood to the very best neighborhoods for black men (e.g., the
top 10% of neighborhoods in terms of upward mobility) produce gains commen-
surate to what one would predict based on the average exposure effect estimates
discussed above. This finding suggests that the exceptional outcomes observed in
certain areas such as Silver Spring are not driven by selection but by the unique
causal effects of such environments on black youth.
40. Examples of such neighborhoods are given in Online Appendix Table XVI.
We do not cut on racial bias in this analysis because of the lack of data on racial
bias at the tract level; doing so would only further reduce the number of “good”
neighborhoods for black children.
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 777

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FIGURE XIV
Father Presence and Poverty Rates by Tract for Black versus White Children
This figure plots the share of black and white children who grow up in four
types of Census tracts: high poverty, low father presence; high poverty, high father
presence; low poverty, low father presence; and low poverty, high father presence.
We define Census tracts as “low poverty” if they have an overall poverty rate below
10% in the 2000 Census; we define tracts as having “high father presence” if more
than 50% of fathers are present in families among children of the same race.

black-white gaps in intergenerational mobility in virtually all ar-

eas of the United States.

VIII. CONCLUSION
Differences in intergenerational mobility are a central driver
of racial disparities in the United States. Black and American In-
dian children have substantially lower rates of upward mobility
and higher rates of downward mobility than white children. The
gap in incomes between blacks and American Indians relative to
whites is thus likely to persist indefinitely without changes in
their rates of intergenerational mobility. In contrast, Hispanics
have relatively high rates of absolute upward mobility and are
moving up significantly in the income distribution across genera-
tions, despite having incomes similar to blacks today.
778 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

The black-white gap—the largest gap among those we

study—is driven entirely by sharp differences in the outcomes
of black and white men who grow up in families with comparable

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incomes. Although closing this gap may appear to be a daunting
challenge given its persistence, there are some encouraging signs
that the problem can be addressed. First, black children have
rates of relative mobility comparable to whites: they are not stuck
at the same income levels as their parents. Closing the gap in op-
portunities between black and white children at a given parental
income level could therefore eliminate much of the black-white
income gap in two generations. Second, the black-white intergen-
erational gap is significantly smaller for boys who grow up in
certain neighborhoods—those with low poverty rates, low levels
of racial bias among whites, and high rates of father presence
among low-income blacks. Black boys who move to such areas
at younger ages have significantly better outcomes, demonstrat-
ing that racial disparities can be narrowed through changes in
environment.
The challenge is to replicate the conditions that lead to these
smaller disparities more broadly across the country. Our findings
suggest that many widely discussed proposals may be insufficient
to narrow the unconditional black-white income gap in the long
run. Policies focused on improving the economic outcomes of a
single generation—such as cash transfer programs or minimum
wage increases—can narrow the gap at a given point in time but
are less likely to have persistent effects unless they also affect
intergenerational mobility. Policies that reduce residential seg-
regation or enable black and white children to attend the same
schools without achieving racial integration within neighborhoods
and schools would also likely leave much of the gap in place, since
the gap persists even among low-income children raised on the
same block.
Instead, our results suggest that efforts that cut within neigh-
borhoods and schools and improve environments for specific racial
subgroups, such as black boys, may be more effective in reducing
the black-white gap. Examples include mentoring programs for
black boys, efforts to reduce racial bias among whites, or efforts
to facilitate social interaction across racial groups within a given
area (e.g., Devine et al. 2012; Heller et al. 2017). Our analysis
does not offer guidance on which interventions of this type are
most effective, but calls for greater focus on and evaluation of
such efforts.
 RACE AND ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN THE UNITED STATES 779

HARVARD UNIVERSITY AND NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC

RESEARCH
HARVARD UNIVERSITY AND NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC

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RESEARCH
U.S. CENSUS BUREAU
U.S. CENSUS BUREAU

SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL
An Online Appendix for this article can be found at The
Quarterly Journal of Economics online. Code replicating tables
and figures in this article can be found in Chetty et al. (2020), in
the Harvard Dataverse, doi:10.7910/DVN/DBW1M3.

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