Research Network on Intergenerational Mobility

Recent studies argue that 60%-100% of geographic variations in upward mobility in the US are due to the causal effect of neighborhoods. I provide evidence that the identifying assumptions underlying the influential studies are untenable for Denmark using detailed registers. The lessons from Denmark likely generalize. I document life cycle heterogeneity in the neighborhood sorting process invalidating the assumption of constant selection effects by the child’s age when the family moves that is maintained in an influential literature. The neighborhood exposure effects estimated in prominent recent studies reflect only correlational estimates of place effects, not causal ones.