The US is often hailed as the land of opportunity, a society in which a child's chances of success depend little on her family background. Is this reputation warranted? An extensive empirical literature on intergenerational mobility, reviewed by Solon (1999), Grawe and Mulligan (2002), and Black and Devereux (2011), has compared mobility across countries and have found that relative mobility is lower in the US than in other developed countries. In new research (Chetty et al. 2014) we show that this question does not have a clear answer because there is substantial variation in intergenerational mobility across areas within the US.
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