The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility
Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie R. Jones, Sonya R. Porter
American Economic Review · 2026 · Volume 116 · Issue 1
Abstract
We construct a public atlas of mean outcomes in adulthood by childhood census tract. Outcomes vary sharply across neighborhoods: For children whose parents earn $27,000, the standard deviation of mean household income in adulthood is $10,420 across tracts within counties. Only half the variation in outcomes is explained by traditional measures of neighborhood opportunity like poverty rates. Experimental and quasi-experimental estimates indicate 60 percent of the variation in outcomes across neighborhoods is driven by causal effects. We demonstrate how our statistics can be applied to better target policies to improve low-opportunity areas and help families move to affordable high-opportunity areas.
Keywords
Household Finance: Household Saving, Borrowing, Debt, and Wealth, Measurement and Analysis of Poverty, Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty: Government Programs, Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs, Marriage, Marital Dissolution, Family Structure, Domestic Abuse, Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics: Regional Migration, Regional Labor Markets, Population, Neighborhood Characteristics
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