Leveling the Playing Field: Access to Local Institutions and Intergenerational Mobility

• In Event: 3151 - Children, Youth, and Inequality

Abstract

As income inequality has risen in the United States, so has parental investment in childhood enrichment, with important consequences for intergenerational mobility and lifelong disparities. This paper looks at whether having access to various types of local institutions can help “level the playing field,” providing children and adolescents with access to various resources that may be important to the status attainment process. To answer this question, I use data from the Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID) and the National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS), estimating the effect of access to social service organizations, cultural institutions, and religious organizations in early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence on upward economic mobility as well as college degree attainment. Using a propensity-score based matching approach and matching individuals on a host of individual, tract-level, and city-level characteristics, I find that access to all three types of local institutions in adolescence is associated with an increase in the likelihood of achieving upward economic mobility and that this effect is particularly pronounced in the case of access to cultural institutions, specifically. Conversely, access to local institutions in early childhood, specifically, is particularly consequential for college degree attainment.

Author

• Delaram Takyar, New York University