This project will investigate how parental resources influence the career choices of young workers, with a specific focus on the impact of parental resources on entrepreneurship and job mobility. Staiger hypothesizes that parental resources shape behavior by providing insurance and relaxing credit constraints. Using U.S. administrative data, he will exploit mass layoffs to estimate the causal effect of parental resources at the time of the layoff on the labor market outcomes of young workers. This is the first project of its kind to use administrative data rather than survey data to investigate how parental resources may impact young workers’ labor market outcomes. Specific outcomes to be explored include the relationship between a young adult’s parents’ earnings at the time of layoff on long-run expected earnings, job mobility, and entrepreneurial activity. The research represents a creative look at the relationship between inequality, innovation, and business dynamism.

This project will look at what alternative approaches could allow those in low-income communities—the majority of which are communities of color—to negotiate an exit from poverty. As the middle of the jobs market has hollowed out and the college wage premium has increased, much of the conversation around policy solutions has focused on upskilling or encouraging more people to pursue higher education. Two-thirds of Americans, however, still lack a bachelor’s degree, a proportion that hasn’t changed much over the decades. This raises the question of what alternative policies could encourage mobility. Hill will explore how economic inequality shapes the perceptions and knowledge of opportunities and options among those in low-income communities of color. In light of deeply racialized American inequality, this project aims to shed light on mechanisms creating and prohibiting social mobility among "low-skilled" or noncollege-educated workers of color.

This research project tackles questions about how gentrification-driven property redevelopment impacts black-owned businesses compared to white-owned businesses. Gentrification studies have largely ignored businesses in favor of examining residences, but commercial enterprises play a key role in shaping neighborhood conditions. Focusing on Detroit, this sociological study combines an analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Survey of Business Owners with qualitative interviews and archival research to analyze how black-owned businesses' growth, inclusion, and access to resources compares to that of white-owned businesses during periods of local redevelopment.

This project investigates what role mentoring can play in economic mobility for disadvantaged youth. To answer the question, Bell plans to link tax records to a dataset of youth applicants to a Big Brothers Big Sisters youth mentoring program. Early economic thinking on the intergenerational perpetuation of disadvantage focused primarily on financial channels. Recent work, however, including some funded by Equitable Growth, has highlighted the importance of childhood environments as a key determinant of success. An initial study found significant positive social outcomes among youth who received mentorship at the close of the 18-month Big Brothers Big Sisters program. Outcomes of interest include college attendance, income and employment, teenage birth, incarceration, and reliance on government assistance. This project will build on Bell’s earlier work with Chetty et al. that shows children who grow up near inventors are not only more likely to become inventors, but also are more likely to invent in similar technologies. A better understanding of the role of social exposure will help identify mechanisms of mobility.

There is currently a debate in the literature about whether income volatility has increased or decreased over the past decade. To help resolve this, the researchers will link the Current Population Survey to the Social Security Administration’s detailed earnings records data. This unique data is essential for understanding earnings, as previous research demonstrates that earnings in household surveys differ from those measured in administrative data—especially at the top and bottom of the income distribution. Determining whether the recent increase in income volatility (as shown in papers using household survey data) also occurs in the administrative earnings data is important in evaluating the changing well-being of individuals and families. It also impacts the measures of inequality. Decreasing volatility may suggest decreasing inequality, which contradicts many recent estimates of the change in inequality in the United States. This work is critical to understanding the nature of inequality in the United States today and the level of income volatility Americans may be experiencing.

This project expands on recent path-breaking work that has documented substantial variation in rates of social mobility across locations in the United States. Where children grow up has a strong influence on the probability that they will earn more than their parents in adulthood, with some regions highly mobile and others lagging far behind. This research suggests that regional differences in opportunity might be explained not only by contemporary characteristics but also by historical disparities. The researchers will merge the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) with Raj Chetty and others’ Equality of Opportunity dataset, and the Logan-Parman index of inequality, providing a profound advancement in the literature with strong policy implications.