Over the course of American history, economic activity, population, and wealth have shifted from rural areas to cities. Rural America is famously “left behind.”
So why are kids who grow up in rural areas more upwardly mobile?
That’s one of many questions raised, in part, through the recent work of Raj Chetty and his colleagues, who documented economic mobility across the country by connecting the incomes of young adults in the 2010s with the incomes of their parents decades earlier. They made the results available to other researchers online, county by county and census tract by census tract, which facilitated a lot of follow-up work.
A new study from Dylan Connor and three coauthors provides some answers, and it appears that family structure is key.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Institute for Family Studies
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Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
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