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和经济机会的驱动因素很感兴趣，但以前的研究往往受到缺乏可用的大型数据集的阻碍，这些数据集将父母和他们的孩子联系起来。因此，关于美国的机会平等，目前还有很多不为人知的地方：美国今天提供的机会平等到什么程度？这在地理上有什么不同？人们通过什么途径提高收入？什么样的政策可以增加这些途径的使用并进一步增加收入流动性？本项目将通过对代际收入流动性进行全面分析，将父母与子女联系起来，建立一个包含绝大多数美国工人及其家庭的综合数据集，试图回答这些问题。pi将分三个阶段处理这些问题。首先，他们将对美国的代际流动进行描述性分析。这包括按地理区域计算流动性，并研究与流动性相关的因素，如就读公立高等教育机构、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激励后续工作，而且是为了使这些统计数据可供未来的研究人员使用，以便其他人可以研究他们自己关于代际流动驱动因素的假设。其次，pi将详细研究几种潜在的流动性途径，目的是量化这些因素对收入流动性的因果影响。这些途径将取决于研究的第一阶段，但研究人员怀疑，例如，进入低成本的高等教育机构可能是向上流动的一个重要渠道。为此目的，他们将评估高等教育的费用是否成为弱势儿童流动的障碍。最后，本项目旨在探讨哪些政府政策（如教育税收抵免、商业激励等）在刺激向上流动方面最有效。本研究更广泛的目标是帮助决策者设计促进机会平等的政策；因此，pi打算对经济政策的分析做出贡献，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.