Person:
Hendren, Nathaniel

Profile Picture

Email Address

AA Acceptance Date

Birth Date

Research Projects

Organizational Units

Job Title

Last Name

Hendren

First Name

Nathaniel

Name

Hendren, Nathaniel

Filters

2014 - 20162

Settings

Author's Publications: search.filters.isAuthorOfPublication.20e5e237-639d-4add-89d1-7fab9455787f

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Publication
    Where is the land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States
    (Oxford University Press (OUP), 2014) Chetty, Raj; Hendren, Nathaniel; Kline, Patrick; Saez, Emmanuel
    We use administrative records on the incomes of more than 40 million children and their parents to describe three features of intergenerational mobility in the United States. First, we characterize the joint distribution of parent and child income at the national level. The conditional expectation of child income given parent income is linear in percentile ranks. On average, a 10 percentile increase in parent income is associated with a 3.4 percentile increase in a child’s income. Second, intergenerational mobility varies substantially across areas within the United States. For example, the probability that a child reaches the top quintile of the national income distribution starting from a family in the bottom quintile is 4.4% in Charlotte but 12.9% in San Jose. Third, we explore the factors correlated with upward mobility. High mobility areas have (i) less residential segregation, (ii) less income inequality, (iii) better primary schools, (iv) greater social capital, and (v) greater family stability. Although our descriptive analysis does not identify the causal mechanisms that determine upward mobility, the publicly available statistics on intergenerational mobility developed here can facilitate research on such mechanisms.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Publication
    The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment
    (American Economic Association, 2016) Chetty, Raj; Hendren, Nathaniel; Katz, Lawrence
    The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment offered randomly selected families housing vouchers to move from high-poverty housing projects to lower-poverty neighborhoods. We analyze MTO's impacts on children's long-term outcomes using tax data. We find that moving to a lower-poverty neighborhood when young (before age 13) increases college attendance and earnings and reduces single parenthood rates. Moving as an adolescent has slightly negative impacts, perhaps because of disruption effects. The decline in the gains from moving with the age when children move suggests that the duration of exposure to better environments during childhood is an important determinant of children's long-term outcomes.