How do children’s chances of climbing the income ladder vary across neighborhoods in America? Where is opportunity lacking and what can we do to improve opportunity in such areas?
In a new study, we construct a comprehensive census tract-level atlas of children’s outcomes in adulthood using anonymized data covering nearly the entire U.S. population. For each tract, we estimate children’s earnings distributions, incarceration rates, and other outcomes in adulthood by parental income, race and gender. These estimates allow us to trace the roots of outcomes such as poverty and incarceration to the neighborhoods in which children grew up.
All research results are provided in a new publicly available online data visualization tool, the Opportunity Atlas, available at http://opportunityatlas.org/, where users can view the data for every census tract in America, overlay their own data points of interest, and export into a data set for their own analysis. Here, we provide a snapshot of this information and discuss some of its potential uses. CONT.
Raj Chetty (Harvard), et al, Census Bureau
