7

New Directions for Research and Policy

This report has reviewed a diverse body of research in an effort to build a nuanced understanding of the trends, patterns, and factors that shape economic and social mobility with a focus on intergenerational mobility—the chances that people have to achieve economic prosperity regardless of their family background. In doing so, the committee has drawn a series of conclusions about the state of knowledge on mobility with an eye toward informing a forward-looking, evidence-based, policy-relevant research agenda. As discussed in Chapter 1, this report focuses on a set of key correlates and drivers of mobility in an effort to detail actionable recommendations for new research to understand mobility and ideas for shaping policy to enhance it.

A research agenda on economic and social mobility is relevant to policymakers at every level of government—federal, state, county, and local. When thinking about safety net approaches to reducing poverty and enhancing mobility, the federal government plays a disproportionate role in part because of its substantially larger tax base. However, states and localities can also shape policies related to education, housing, labor markets, financial institutions, and health care, among other domains. State governments play an important role in establishing policies on family planning and formation, education, financial institutions, and spatial issues. Counties and local governments share authority to enact zoning laws and design public transportation and other transportation policy, and they also have some authority regarding education and social welfare program policy. Thus, all levels of government can innovate and evaluate policies tied directly

and indirectly to economic and social mobility and the specific domains described herein.

This report also makes clear that policymakers can take a variety of approaches to promote economic and social mobility. In fact, the findings in this report indicate that there is no single solution, “silver bullet,” or pathway to enhancing mobility that is sufficient because of the multiple channels that support or prevent mobility. Policy levers will differ depending on the level of the policy actors (federal, state, local) and may have different effects on absolute and relative mobility. Many of the policies considered by the committee focus on improving the well-being of disadvantaged families, which would support both absolute upward mobility and relative mobility, by detaching individuals from their disadvantaged origins. Alternatively, policies reducing tax, educational, or other benefits for higher-income households may improve relative mobility because they would reduce the ability of high-income parents to pass resources to their children. While the committee acknowledges that some channels for intergenerational economic persistence may be difficult or undesirable to alter via social policy, we argue that there is great opportunity to promote mobility in the United States by dismantling economic and institutional barriers to economic prosperity and instability through policy intervention.

With that said, types of policy approaches to enhance mobility may be categorized into three broad strategies. The first, a safety net approach that seeks to puts a floor on the level of deprivation experienced by members of society, is the most common—it generally focuses on repairing deficits and compensating for disadvantages within low-income populations. This sometimes involves setting up subsidiary institutions to serve low-income populations, operating in parallel to mainstream institutions. Examples include Head Start, public housing or subsidized housing vouchers, workforce development centers, or financial instruments available only to lower-income families. The primary goal and stated purpose of these programs may be to reduce poverty rather than enhance mobility, but in providing resources that support families such policies can have a positive direct effect on upward mobility. They could also support relative mobility by detaching young people growing up in poor households from disadvantages of birth. A side effect of the safety net approach is a one-sided focus on the mobility challenges faced by low-income populations, with little focus on the effects of disproportionate opportunities among those born at the top of the resource distribution. The focus of “supplementary” programs is on increasing opportunity among those born into the bottom of the class system, rather than building mainstream institutions that broaden opportunities for mobility across the entire population.

A second strategy, then, is reforming mainstream institutions to make them work better for all Americans. Such a strategy could change the policy

landscape to make such institutions as banks, schools, and housing developments more inclusive. This might mean, for example, making bank accounts or lending at financial institutions more accessible to low-income families or making a more concerted effort to integrate new housing developments by household income to reduce economic segregation. The evidence base on this type of approach is more limited and more difficult to collect, so comparatively less is known about how to reform mainstream institutions or what the outcomes of such changes would be.

A final strategy is forgoing new ideas for policy and instead rolling back policies that constrict mobility or support the persistence of advantage across generations. Many policies thought of as enhancing economic and social mobility have been used for the opposite purpose. Indeed, many of the mechanisms by which opportunity has been restricted—especially by characteristics such as race, ethnicity, and gender—have been aided and abetted by social policy. More attention could be paid to the impacts of rolling back policies that limit the mobility of certain groups, whether absolutely or relative to others. This might include housing (e.g., zoning laws that reduce the availability of affordable housing), assets (e.g., tax policies that favor certain types of assets or sources of income primarily owned by wealthy families), educational (e.g., tax benefits that disproportionately help higher-income families save for college), or other policies that disproportionately favor high-income groups by providing subsidies or resources that further support the persistence of advantage across generations.

The conclusions and recommendations presented in this report can be used to inform and advance all three policy strategies. The next sections walk through the key domains that drive economic and social mobility as discussed in this report (early life and family; space and place; postsecondary education; wealth, credit, and debt), followed by a section that reviews the needs for a new data infrastructure to measure and study these key pathways. Each section lists the key conclusions and recommendations, numbered according to the report chapter in which they were developed. The final section reviews the report’s discussion of a National Mobility Center and highlights the importance of combining different sources of data and methodological approaches to understand mobility dynamics.

EARLY LIFE AND FAMILY

Considerable evidence makes it clear that what happens in early life shapes people’s life trajectories. Thus, it is imperative for any research agenda on mobility to include expanded understanding of the intersection of circumstances in early life with long-term economic and social mobility. Family—however constructed—is the fundamental unit of social organization during the early life period. It is clear that how families function is

critical to such outcomes as cognitive and socioemotional development, educational attainment, human capital formation, and individual and family health and well-being in the next generation. As such, families are the central unit of intergenerational mobility. Naturally, families do not operate in a vacuum, so their role in the mobility process depends on how they are shaped by institutional and economic resources and constraints. The committee therefore spent considerable time reviewing the evidence on early life and family as it relates to mobility, arriving at the following key conclusions:

Conclusion 2-1: Unintended pregnancies and childbirth are adversely associated with multiple determinants of upward mobility from poverty and persistence of advantage, in domains such as infant and maternal health, cognitive and socioemotional development, human capital formation, and economic well-being.

Conclusion 2-2: Socioeconomic disparities in parenting behaviors and resources are associated with disparities in the social and economic well-being of children throughout the life course, thus providing a mechanism for the persistence of advantage and disadvantage across generations.

Conclusion 2-3: Early childhood education programs, and reproductive health policies and programs that increase access to contraception and abortion, show promise for increasing upward intergenerational mobility. Economic support policies and programs that increase access to financial resources, food, and health care also show promise for increasing upward mobility. In contrast, the evidence on other pregnancy risk reduction, abstinence education, and parenting intervention programs is less encouraging.

Policy strategies that build on the existing evidence on early life and family could be based on any of the three approaches described at the start of this chapter. Conclusions 2-1 and 2-3 support reproductive health, early childhood education, and economic support programs and policies that may be either narrowly targeted or be more universal in design. Conclusion 2-2 highlights the importance of considering the broader forces and institutions that produce and perpetuate socioeconomic and racial/ethnic disparities. With each approach, a more robust evidence base will further inform the development of policies in this domain. The committee offers two research recommendations on early life and family:

Recommendation 2-1: The vast majority of research linking early life and family experiences to intergenerational mobility is descriptive in nature. Researchers should expand the use of existing longitudinal, administrative, and survey data and, when possible, further employ quasi-experimental and experimental approaches to obtain a better understanding of the causal mechanisms through which family context (pregnancy intendedness, family formation, family structure and stability), parenting behaviors and the caregiving environment, and child development affect economic and social mobility, as well as potential heterogeneity in such relationships for demographic subpopulations.

Recommendation 2-2: Existing survey and administrative data are not fully adequate to support comprehensive research on intergenerational economic and social mobility and the range of mechanisms through which mobility may occur. Existing longitudinal surveys, such as the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study—currently the only long-term ongoing U.S. panel studies to follow multiple generations of family members—should be maintained and expanded to include detailed information on pregnancy intention and the circumstances of pregnancies, parenting, and child development for all children born to current sample members. In addition, the samples that support these surveys should be refreshed with respondents that represent the contemporary population, especially Latino/Hispanic and immigrant subgroups. The children should be followed in utero and onward and assessed regularly at intervals representing key developmental stages of childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. In addition, these surveys should be linked to administrative data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Internal Revenue Service, and state and federal agencies that administer core social welfare programs.

These recommendations—and those from the other chapters—demonstrate the benefits of the growing data infrastructure that is revolutionizing mobility-related research (discussed in Chapter 6) presently underway.

SPACE AND PLACE

There is perhaps no area of research on intergenerational mobility that has seen more development in recent years than the role of space and place. Drawing on this scholarship, the committee arrived at four key conclusions on current scholarly consensus and the best focus for a forward-looking, policy-relevant research agenda.

Conclusion 3-1: Recent evidence suggests that residential environments have a causal impact on economic and social mobility (measured by income, earnings, or occupation) and on intermediate outcomes related to mobility, such as cognitive development and educational attainment. The link between place and individual outcomes has now moved beyond the question of whether neighborhoods matter and toward questions of when, where, why, and for whom residential contexts matter.

Conclusion 3-2: At the neighborhood level, the mechanisms linking the local residential environment with economic and social mobility include schools, community violence, and local social networks. At larger levels of analysis—such as cities, counties, and commuting zones—the forces that influence economic and social mobility include segregation and local labor market conditions.

Conclusion 3-3: Most spatial policy strategies are either housing mobility policies, which relocate families to higher-opportunity areas, or place-conscious investments, which aim to bring opportunity and investment into disadvantaged communities. Although both have the potential to boost economic and social mobility, evidence on the effectiveness of place-based programs that do not target people in disadvantaged communities and do not provide a range of supports is mixed.

Conclusion 3-4: In addition to new housing mobility initiatives and place-based investments, it is important to consider approaches that focus on ending existing programs and policies that have historically amplified spatial and racial inequality and continue to do so.

These conclusions identify the need to move beyond scholarly inquiry about whether place matters, to discuss more about why and how and in what circumstances it matters. Per Conclusion 3-2, there are already some key insights about the mechanisms that affect mobility at the neighborhood and larger levels of geographic analysis; the former may underpin policy interventions that are more targeted in nature, while the latter may inform policies that address larger societal forces and mainstream institutions. In Conclusion 3-4, the committee calls for addressing existing policies that amplify spatial and racial inequalities, such as zoning, discriminatory housing practices, and some regressive federal housing programs (such as the mortgage interest deduction, property tax deduction, and exclusion of capital gains on the sales of homes) that reinforce residential segregation and constrain residential mobility.

The efficacy of strategies implemented at scale to move people to opportunities as opposed to improving the quality of the communities in

which they live remains a key question for the field. As noted in Conclusion 3-3, some housing mobility interventions have shown promise, but there is a lack of clarity about the general equilibrium effects of implementing such interventions at scale. At the same time, the overall record of place-conscious investments for improving outcomes that are proximate to social mobility is mixed at best. Place-conscious programs—such as New Hope, the Harlem Children’s Zone, and Jobs Plus—that target residents of disadvantaged communities with employment opportunities, training, and support services and/or provide resources to foster job creation and economic development have shown success in improving employment, earnings, and academic outcomes for participants. However, evidence on the effectiveness of broader place-based programs that have not targeted people in disadvantaged communities and have not provided a range of supports has been mixed. Thus, additional research and policy experimentation is needed to develop actionable policies that rigorously address the relationship between space and place and economic and social mobility.

Continued research (in at least the seven areas listed in Recommendation 3-1 below) needs to use a wide range of methods to deepen the understanding of these and other mechanisms and dynamics at play. Perhaps most importantly, the committee highlights that, from a policy standpoint, the understanding of how to combat the deep relationships between space and place and economic and social mobility is still in its infancy. Although existing research has demonstrated that schooling, public funding, community violence, social capital, and racial and economic segregation are all strongly associated with economic mobility, a better understanding is needed of the processes by which these factors lead to mobility. Foregrounding heterogeneity (e.g., who takes up housing vouchers, the characteristics of neighborhoods in which families start and end up, the age and gender of children who move) enables an understanding of which groups are most likely to benefit from social policies designed to reduce spatial inequality or increase economic and social mobility. Qualitative research can further assist in generating insights and hypotheses about the mechanisms by which place shapes mobility, using ethnographic observation and semistructured interviews; these insights can then be integrated into further quantitative tests and policy development.

Recommendation 3-1: Researchers should strengthen the evidence base on space and place in the following areas: (1) causal impacts of the key mechanisms that link place with economic and social mobility; (2) heterogeneity in the relationship between place and economic and social mobility; (3) qualitative approaches to understanding the mechanisms that undergird the causal effects of place, as well as the mechanisms that explain evidence on effective policy; (4) causal impacts of various

types of place-based investments; (5) existing policies and interventions that amplify spatial inequality; (6) general equilibrium effects of social policies and the feasibility and costs of different approaches; and (7) neighborhood contexts of disadvantaged rural, small town, and suburban areas.

POSTSECONDARY EDUCATION

Elementary and secondary education (i.e., K–12) and postsecondary education both matter for economic and social mobility. The committee decided to focus on postsecondary education because it has received less attention from research and policy than K–12. Postsecondary education is also increasingly on the minds of the public and policymakers when they think about pathways to enhance economic and social mobility. How does a system of postsecondary education build ladders to economic success for anyone, from any starting point? While what happens to individuals before they reach this stage is of critical importance, access to and persistence in postsecondary education is highly stratified by income, location of residence, and racial minority status. Even among those growth of for-profit schools and other educational providers who enroll in higher education, the probability of graduating, the amount of debt taken, and the quality of education received strongly depends on social background. Understanding these sources of stratification is crucial when shaping systems to become engines of economic and social mobility.

Conclusion 4-1: Postsecondary education in the United States is a very strong predictor of economic well-being and is a critical determinant of intergenerational mobility. However, there are considerable disparities in college enrollment and completion by family income, location of residence, and race and ethnicity. There are also growing disparities by gender, favoring women, the consequences of which are poorly understood.

Conclusion 4-2: Existing data sources cannot be used to properly evaluate current changes in the association between parent’s income and bachelor’s degree attainment. This data limitation can be addressed by linking survey data with administrative data.

Conclusion 4-3: Although the attainment of a 4-year bachelor’s degree is a very strong predictor of economic well-being and security, postsecondary education has become an increasingly risky proposition for many adults and families, especially those who have low incomes and are racial minorities. Broad-access institutions, certificate programs, and the growth of for-profit schools and other educational providers

has increased the menu of options but has not necessarily increased completion rates or returns.

Conclusion 4-4: People transition between school and work and between careers throughout their lives and in different ways. Economic and social mobility can be enhanced by recognizing the need for multiple pathways to mobility beyond a college degree, commensurate with people’s many starting points and transitions.

Recommendation 4-1: Researchers should examine the implications for economic and social mobility of growing gender differences in college completion.

Recommendation 4-2: Researchers should conduct comprehensive, distributive analyses of the economic costs, benefits, and risks of college and explore the question of the extent to which U.S. postsecondary education is a replicator of intergenerational inequality rather than an engine for intergenerational mobility. Attention should be paid to variations in returns across the heterogeneous postsecondary sector, with broad-access institutions playing a central role for the vast majority of the population, different from that of more elite and selective universities.

Recommendation 4-3: Researchers should explore whether postsecondary funding models in other countries—especially with regard to sub-baccalaureate education—are more effective in generating economic mobility than the U.S. model.

Recommendation 4-4: Researchers should study ways to stimulate demand for postsecondary education for particular populations and settings. Evidence is needed about specific populations defined by level of academic preparation, race and ethnicity, income levels, residential location, and age.

Recommendation 4-5: Researchers should study the effects of inputs, policies, and practices (e.g., curricula, pedagogical techniques, class size, connections to employment opportunities) on the quality of postsecondary education and the implications for economic and social mobility.

Recommendation 4-6: Researchers should study the effectiveness of programs and policies to support the trajectories of those without

bachelor’s degrees, as well as multiple transitions and pathways between schooling, training, and work.

Although other parts of the report bring attention to nonmainstream institutions, such as alternative credit providers, this report’s conclusions and recommendations on postsecondary education emphasize reforming mainstream institutions. Understanding the outcomes yielded by our current systems of colleges and universities can enable policymakers to build with an eye toward broad-based access to opportunity to promote mobility.

WEALTH, CREDIT, AND DEBT

Individuals and families are subject to a complicated financial services landscape, with the possibility of both risk and reward. Wealth, credit, and debt are each directly linked to the other domains discussed in this report (early life and family, space and place, and postsecondary education). A research agenda for enhancing economic and social mobility includes developing a clearer understanding of the relationships between economic and social mobility and wealth, credit, and debt that can then be built on to test policy responses.

Conclusion 5-1: Wealth is transmitted across generations. This transmission occurs partly directly, through transfers and bequests, but also indirectly, through advantages that accrue to children in their early development, neighborhood, educational, and labor market experiences; these indirect channels of wealth transmission undergird wealth’s role in sustaining other forms of economic and social mobility. In addition to monetary advantages, family wealth can provide a safety net or buffer that allows individuals to take risks.

Conclusion 5-2: Wealth accumulation and intergenerational wealth transmission are shaped by multiple institutional and structural features of U.S. society that have not been and are still not race neutral.

Conclusion 5-3: Credit and debt are not monolithic. For many individuals, they provide opportunities to make core long-term investments and take risks that engender wealth accumulation and upward mobility. For others, they are hindrances to upward mobility, if not direct sources of downward mobility.

Conclusion 5-4: Targeted policies can address the intergenerational transmission of wealth at different points of the wealth distribution, from the top (through inheritance and wealth taxation), to the middle

(chiefly through housing policies), to the bottom (through credit market regulation and asset-building policies). More universal policies (e.g., universal stakeholder grants, baby bonds, reparations) can build a common stock of wealth for all. However, more needs to be known about the relative promise of each of these approaches and of the mechanisms for funding them.

Wealth is a primary factor in shaping intergenerational mobility in the United States; perhaps its most distinctive feature is that it can be transmitted directly to one’s children and even grandchildren. Credit and debt may be regarded as two-edged swords in efforts to enhance economic and social mobility—each can be a vehicle to achieve this goal, but each in turn can also thwart it. Few existing policies explicitly target the intergenerational persistence of wealth, which is striking given its importance to economic and social mobility. Blacks and Hispanics have historically faced major barriers to wealth accumulation, and Conclusion 5-2 calls attention to the structural features of society that may produce such disparities in the accumulation and intergenerational transmission of wealth; Conclusion 5-4 sets forth a framework for policy intervention that is relevant to the full range of the wealth distribution. The committee identified several areas where the existing evidence base needs to be strengthened to better inform the development of policy interventions relating to wealth, credit, and debt.

Recommendation 5-1: Researchers should examine the intergenerational behavioral implications of assets and debt to better understand the indirect channels through which wealth is transmitted.

Recommendation 5-2: Researchers should expand the traditional two-generation mobility framework by considering the role of grandparental wealth and debt.

Recommendation 5-3: Researchers should further examine the ongoing role of institutions, policies, and practices in reproducing racial/ethnic wealth gaps and expand beyond White and Black populations to generate evidence on wealth mobility patterns for other racial/ethnic groups.

Recommendation 5-4: Researchers should study in what circumstances, how, and for whom different forms of credit and debt are helpful or harmful for economic and social mobility.

Recommendation 5-5: Researchers should study the relative costs, benefits, and long-term effects of (1) policies that target the intergenerational transmission of wealth at different points in the wealth

distribution (top, middle, and bottom); (2) universal policies that seek to provide wealth transfers to all families or young people or provide reparations for slavery; and (3) broader institutional changes that would reduce the necessity of families to rely on their private wealth to support the success of the next generation. Researchers should also study the potential of the existing taxation system and new tax policies to support these initiatives.

DATA INFRASTRUCTURE

The United States is moving toward having a modern integrated data system based on linked administrative data that will rival the systems in many European countries. Developing sustainable structures that ensure increased and equitable access to new data resources remains a central challenge ahead. Achieving this requires cooperation among the many stakeholders in the data ecosystem, including executive and congressional branches of government, federal statistical agencies, state and local government officials, the research community, potential private funding organizations, and the general public. Chapter 6 outlines a number of conclusions and recommendations that can facilitate this new data infrastructure.

Beyond sharing across agencies, it is important to improve data access for researchers. Data access laws, such as those found in U.S. Code Titles 13 and 26, need to be modernized to facilitate research, as they have proven to be inadequate amid the recent growth of research using linked administrative data. A key advantage of emerging linked administrative datasets is the option for researchers to obtain data from multiple sources and agencies through efforts such as the National Secure Data Service. Additionally, it is important to adequately fund agencies to allow them to provide data.

Finally, the United States lacks an institutional body charged with ensuring that the country’s commitment to equal opportunity is taken into account when policy is developed and evaluated. Because research on intergenerational mobility is central to assessing the current and future wellbeing of the U.S. economy and society, the creation of a nongovernmental research center—a National Mobility Center—is appropriate.

Conclusion 6-1: Research on mobility-relevant programs and policies requires the use of blended, multigenerational data for multiple domains—especially family, place, education, and wealth—including both surveys and administrative data (e.g., tax and benefit data). Also needed is a process for ensuring that qualified researchers can access these blended data within a secure environment; this process needs to explicitly recognize both the risk of using confidential administrative data in research and the benefits to society that can be produced from this research.

Conclusion 6-2: The data structure for studying economic and social mobility will be strengthened if state agencies provide (1) the U.S. Census Bureau with data on all programs that receive federal funding, and (2) the National Center for Health Statistics with both current and past data that are part of the National Vital Statistics System. States would require funding to adopt systems and processes to comply with reporting requirements.

Conclusion 6-3: The data infrastructure for studying economic and social mobility will be strengthened if the ban prohibiting the federal government from tracking students and from maintaining a national database of student records is repealed.

Conclusion 6-4: In order to facilitate data access for studying economic and social mobility, funding is required for streamlining the data application process, improving linking, supporting Federal Statistical Research Data Centers, enhancing the survey infrastructure, and expanding qualitative research.

Conclusion 6-5: The United States lacks an institutional body charged with ensuring that the country’s commitment to equal opportunity is properly considered when policy is developed and evaluated. A National Mobility Center could serve as a key resource for facilitating data access, reporting on current mobility statistics and analyzing trends, identifying promising systemic and institutional interventions, developing viable approaches for evaluation, and building an interdisciplinary research community to study economic and social mobility.

Recommendation 6-1: Building on the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 (Evidence Act), the chief statistician of the United States should work with federal agencies to advise legislators and policymakers to address the need for revisions to regulations to improve data sharing across federal statistical agencies, including

1. revisiting U.S. Code Title 26 to allow the Internal Revenue Service to expand the ability to share tax data with the U.S. Census Bureau that are needed to create more comprehensive measures of household income and wealth;
2. issuing the Presumption of Access rule that was part of the 2018 Evidence Act, thus ensuring that federal agencies share data among themselves; and
3. requiring nonstatistical federal agencies to provide annual data to the U.S. Census Bureau so that it can conduct an annual administrative record census.

Recommendation 6-2: In order to evaluate the policies surrounding economic and social mobility, researchers require tiered access to new blended data. The chief statistician of the United States should work with the federal agencies to review and revise policies concerning external data sharing with the broader research community, including (1) revisiting the missions of federal statistical agencies to formally acknowledge the need for data sharing and the broader benefits to society of research itself; (2) using tiered access to support access for qualified external researchers; (3) expanding the Standard Application Process to ensure that all proposals are evaluated within 3 months; and (4) providing remote access to Federal Statistical Research Data Centers to facilitate data sharing with more researchers. The National Secure Data Service should also work with federal agencies to ensure that these improved data access, analysis, and linking mechanisms are implemented.

Recommendation 6-3: To increase the value of data for studying economic and social mobility, federal agencies should collaborate with the National Secure Data Service to improve the data acquisition and linking process by assigning protected identification keys (PIKs) to federal surveys:

1. The U.S. Census Bureau should improve the person identification validation system (PVS), which should serve as the standard for linking all individual-level data held by all federal agencies.
2. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau should assign PIKs to all records that are part of the (i) monthly Current Population Survey back to 1963, (ii) Consumer Expenditure Survey, (iii) American Time Use Survey, and (iv) National Longitudinal Surveys.
3. The U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Census Bureau should assign a PIK to individual Free Application for Federal Student Aid forms, as well as to individual-level administrative data on federal financial aid receipt.

NATIONAL MOBILITY CENTER

What can be done to forward the research agenda summarized in this chapter? As discussed in Chapter 6, one of the major barriers to drawing conclusions about policymaking regarding economic and social mobility has been inadequate data. Mobility is difficult to measure and occurs only over extended periods of time, including across generations and over the life course of individuals, thus requiring large-scale longitudinal data for its analysis. However, the nation is on the cusp of revolutionizing the study

of mobility, in that many new sources of data from administrative records, such as tax records and decennial censuses, will become more accessible to researchers. Indeed, as delineated by the discussion of data infrastructure in Chapter 6, the United States is moving toward a modern integrated data system linking such administrative sources that is in line with many peer countries. This is now beginning to and will further open a host of new opportunities for research. Never before have scholars and analysts been so well equipped to forward this research agenda. As discussed in Chapter 6, a National Mobility Center could serve as a clearinghouse and resource center for statistics on and analysis of mobility trends and dynamics (see Conclusion 6-5). It could serve as a training ground for new scholars who want to conduct research on economic and social mobility. And it could make the confidential administrative data needed to study mobility more accessible—with proper protections—to a broader group of researchers. Such a center could become an important hub that pushes forward much of the research agenda discussed in this report; it would make this metric of economic well-being a priority commensurate to the concern and goals of the American public. In addition to facilitating access to and training on new sources of linked administrative and blended microdata, such a center could also help in setting standards and training researchers on best practices for a variety of methods—including rigorous qualitative inquiry (discussed in Chapter 3) and helping decision-makers understand how a policy or intervention is perceived and valued by those for whom it is intended.

This report highlights the importance and value of qualitative research to the study of the drivers of economic and social mobility and the development of programs and policies to enhance it. In recent years, there has been a sharp rise in the use of qualitative research in the social sciences and growing acknowledgment of its value (Edin et al., 2024). For example, many researchers and policy evaluation scholars are often far removed from the everyday lives and social settings of people they study and who are likely to be affected by mobility interventions. As a result, they typically operate without enough information to understand exactly how an intervention is working within its sociocultural and historical context. Sometimes they do not even know the right questions to ask. Thus at least one key benefit of qualitative work is that it brings policy researchers and those evaluating programs much closer to the contexts of people who are impacted by these interventions.

For instance, an intervention may have strong efficacy for those who participate, but may have low take-up rates and no impact at scale because of a lack of community buy-in. If a program or intervention provides resources to support upward mobility but fails to attract a broad enough section of the target population, then the scale of its impact will be severely circumscribed. Qualitative research can help build knowledge about why target populations do or do not take up an intervention, and perhaps reveal

policy levers that can increase take-up and thus enhance impact (Barnes, 2020; DeLuca & Rosenblatt, 2010; Halpern-Meekin et al., 2015; Romich & Weisner, 2000).

Most importantly, though, qualitative research plays a vital role in the basic science of mobility research, with major implications for mobility policy formation. It allows scholars to interrogate important theoretical and policy assumptions; to generate hypotheses for future data collection, analysis, research design, and intervention development. It is an avenue for identifying potential causal mechanisms (which can be evaluated using survey and administrative data) that are drivers of economic and social mobility and may also be targets for policy intervention; it can also reveal the perceptions and beliefs held by those for whom programs and policies are targeted, which aids in more effective policy designs. This report highlights numerous examples of insights offered to the study of mobility in understanding patterns of family formation, the importance of place in determining mobility, and in understanding how and why higher education may or may not be a path toward upward mobility. Qualitative research with target populations and the communities in which they are embedded is a source of valuable data for making decisions on program efficacy (Andrews et al., 2019) and for building policies and programs that enhance mobility.

CONCLUSION

This report seeks to dive into the evidence base on economic and social mobility and to create a forward-looking, policy-relevant research agenda for the future. Clearly, the lack of available data has slowed progress in building knowledge on this metric of economic well-being in the United States. But standing on the cusp of a mobility data revolution, it will likely be possible to reach new heights in the understanding and design of policy to enhance economic and social mobility.

The charge for this report is motivated by the fact that economic and social mobility is a key measure of well-being, and it underlies a fundamental value held by many Americans: that anyone should be able to succeed economically, regardless of circumstances such as family life, home community, and the assets they start out with. The goal that all Americans will have the opportunity for economic and social mobility has been a fundamental tenet throughout U.S. history, even as many observers may rightly argue that it has been, at times and for many groups, severely circumscribed. There is no question, however, that the economic and social mobility of groups of Americans who were systematically excluded for generations—particularly Black Americans and women—has improved over time, even though the pace has been slow and deep inequalities in opportunity persist. More must be done to enhance mobility broadly if the country is to finally live up to the values espoused by its founding documents and the vast majority of its citizens.