A Child in Seattle Has a Much Better Chance of Escaping Poverty Than a Child in Atlanta

We know that a child's chances of escaping poverty are highly dependent on factors beyond his control – his parents' income, their educational background, the school he attends, the demographics of his classmates, the characteristics of the neighborhood outside his door. But it turns out that a child's prospects for upward mobility are also highly influenced by the most basic question of geography: Depending on which city his parents raised him in, he has dramatically different odds of growing up to be someone who isn't poor.

Academics from Harvard and UC Berkeley recently set out to study if local tax expenditures (and particularly tax credits for the poor) in fact help lift children out of poverty, promoting intergenerational mobility. They figured they could better understand the benefits of tax policy by leveraging the variety of ways that it differs across the country. Their massive study – "the most detailed portrait yet of income mobility in the United States," as The New York Times put it this morning – spanned 740 "commuting zones" across the U.S., roughly analogous to metropolitan areas but covering the entire country. And they examined an entire cohort of American children born in 1980 and 1981, whose parents' income and later adult income was calculated using millions of anonymous earnings records.