Research Finds Location Impacts Upward Mobility

Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States, a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by researchers at Harvard and UC-Berkeley, compares the incomes of parents when their children were teenagers to the incomes of the children when they were about 30. Places with high mobility have less residential segregation, less income inequality, better primary schools, greater social capital, and greater family stability. Regionally, upward mobility is lowest in the Southeast and highest in the Great Plains. There are variations within regions as well. Rural residents are more upwardly mobile than urban ones: while 44.6% of all children who grew up in rural areas lived in urban areas at age 30, 55.2% of those who rose from the bottom quintile of the national income distribution to the top quintile grew up in rural areas and lived in urban places at age 30.

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