Pathways to Economic Opportunity and Intergenerational Mobility: Evidence from United States Tax Records

许多美国人信奉“机会平等”的理想，相信一个人的经济机会不应该取决于他们碰巧出生的父母。虽然许多研究人员对代际流动性和经济机会的驱动因素很感兴趣，但之前的研究往往因为缺乏将父母和孩子联系起来的大型数据集而受阻。因此，关于美国的机会平等，目前有很多未知之处：美国目前在多大程度上提供了机会平等？这在地理上有什么不同？人们通过什么途径来提升收入阶梯？什么类型的政策可以增加这些途径的使用，并进一步提高收入流动性？这个项目将通过在一个包含绝大多数美国工人及其家庭的综合数据集中，将父母与孩子联系起来，对代际收入流动性进行全面分析，以寻求回答这些问题。PIs将分三个阶段解决这些问题。首先，他们将对美国代际流动性进行描述性分析。这包括按精细地理区域计算流动性，并研究与流动性相关的因素，如上公立高等教育机构、创业或强劲的当地劳动力市场。这项描述性工作的目的不仅是为了激励后续的工作，而且也是为了让未来的研究人员能够获得这些统计数据，以便其他人能够研究他们自己关于代际流动驱动因素的假设。第二，物价指数将详细研究流动的几个潜在途径，目的是量化这些因素对收入流动的因果影响。这些途径将取决于研究的第一阶段，但研究人员怀疑，例如，进入低成本高等教育机构可能是向上流动的一个重要渠道。为此，他们将评估高等教育费用是否会成为弱势儿童流动的障碍。最后，该项目旨在探索哪些政府政策(例如，教育税收抵免、商业激励等)在刺激向上流动方面最有效。这项研究的更广泛目标是帮助政策制定者设计促进机会平等的政策；因此，私人投资指数打算促进对经济政策的分析，不仅关注当代人，而且确定政策对子孙后代福祉的影响。

Many Americans embrace the ideal of "equality of opportunity", believing in the ideal that ones' economic opportunities should not depend on the parents to whom they happen to be born. While numerous researchers have been interested in the drivers of intergenerational mobility and economic opportunity, previous studies have often been hindered by a lack of available large datasets linking parents and their children. As a result, there is much currently unknown about equality of opportunity in the US: To what extent does the US offer equality of opportunity today? How does this vary geographically? What pathways do people use to move up the income ladder? And what types of policies can increase the use of these pathways and further increase income mobility?This project will seek to answer these questions by conducting a comprehensive analysis of intergenerational income mobility by linking parents to children in a comprehensive dataset comprising the vast majority of US workers and their families.The PIs will approach these questions in three stages. First, they will provide a descriptive analysis of intergenerational mobility in the United States. This includes calculating rates of mobility by fine geographic areas and studying the factors correlated with mobility, such as attending public higher educational institutions, starting a business, or strong local labor markets. The aim of this descriptive work is to motivate not only the subsequent work, but also to make these statistics accessible to future researchers so that others can study their own hypothesis about drivers of intergenerational mobility. Second, the PIs will study several potential pathways of mobility in detail with the aim of quantifying the causal impact of these factors on income mobility. These pathways will depend on the first stage of the research, but the researchers suspect, for example, that access to low-cost higher educational institutions may be one important channel for upward mobility. To this aim, they will evaluate whether the cost of higher education is a barrier to mobility for disadvantaged children. Finally, this project aims to explore which government policies (e.g. education tax credits, business incentives, etc.) are most effective in stimulating upward mobility. The broader goal of this study is to help policymakers design policies that promote equality of opportunity; hence, the PIs intend to contribute to an analysis of economic policy that focuses not only on the current generation, but identifies the impact of policies on the well-being of future generations.