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Family, community, and the rural social mobility advantage [1]

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Date: 2023-10-01

Since the 1980s, technological and political forces have restructured the economic geography of the United States (Autor, 2019, Connor and Storper, 2020, Kemeny and Storper, 2020). In particular, once prosperous local and regional industrial economies have lost ground to an elite tier of “superstar” metropolitan areas (Connor, Kemeny, & Storper, 2023, Gyourko et al., 2013, VanHeuvelen, 2022), reducing intergenerational mobility rates across many industrial regions (Berger and Engzell, 2022, O’Brien et al., 2022).1 Over the same period, however, the intergenerational mobility rates of children from rural regions now look surprisingly favorable when compared to urban regions (Connor and Storper, 2020, Weber et al., 2017, Weber et al., 2018). The strong economic performance of children from rural backgrounds appears paradoxical and requires further investigation. Addressing this puzzle could help inform policy efforts to boost equality of opportunity across all places.

This paper investigates these issues by measuring the size of the rural advantage in income mobility and by determining who has benefited from it. Despite longstanding interest in how rural places shape child wellbeing (Manning & Lichter, 1996) and a very recent double special issue on the topic (Clark et al., 2022), the basic quantitative facts linking place-level rurality and intergenerational mobility are not well established. This situation reflects the challenges in combining data on intergenerational mobility outcomes and the rurality of childhood communities. We advance the conversation through the construction of a novel place-level dataset that measures the socioeconomic characteristics, rurality, and income mobility of over 20,000 places of childhood in the United States. Places are used to characterize the early life context of socialization, a more precise geography than counties which are more typically studied in the literature. We measure the rural advantage in income mobility using data from Opportunity Insights (Chetty et al., 2018) and attempt to explain it based on established determinants of intergenerational mobility.

Why would intergenerational mobility rates today differ for rural and urban children? Given the growing precarity of many rural communities within an economy that favors cities, we might expect it to be children in urban places who are advantaged in income mobility (De la Roca & Puga, 2017; Green, 2020). If, however, the conditions in which children are raised matters more than where they enter the labor market (e.g., Chetty et al., 2014), rural childhoods could confer long-lasting benefits. Small towns are, after all, noted for having high levels of community trust, social capital, accelerated paths through key life states, and, at least historically, more two-parent households (Heaton et al., 1989, Hofferth and Iceland, 1998, Miller and Edin, 2022, Putnam, 2016, Wirth, 1938).2 Prior findings, including those from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study and Opportunity Insights, highlight the critical role of family and community conditions in shaping children’s early cognitive development and later life attainment (Chetty et al., 2022a, Dupraz and Ferrara, 2023, Jackson et al., 2017, James et al., 2021, McLanahan and Sandefur, 2009). These findings are related to a longer and contested literature (Moynihan, 1965, Wilson, 1987), describing what Kearney (2023) refers to as the “Two-Parent Privilege”. Differences along these dimensions are, therefore, plausible hypotheses for why rural places may exhibit higher than average rates of intergenerational mobility.

There are also more specific features of small-town living that could matter. Rural outmigration is noted for being highly selective (Carr & Kefalas, 2009) and it may be the case that the income attainment of rural-origin children could be driven exclusively by those who move to cities or wealthier regions (Anstreicher, 2023). The cultural homogeneity and lack of anonymity of rural communities may also exert unique social and moral pressures that may affect how lower income rural families cope with poverty (Sherman, 2006). This is particularly notable given the strong racial and ethnic contours to rural poverty in the United States (Lichter & Brown, 2011; Manning & Lichter, 1996) and its link to intergenerational mobility (Lichter & Johnson, 2021). Our study is thus not just concerned with establishing the general association between rurality and intergenerational mobility, but also with investigating where and for whom this association holds.

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[1] Url: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0276562423000884

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