concentrated poverty 6 Flashcards
(10 cards)
What is the principal strength of Chetty & Hendren’s national tax-data study?
External validity—it leverages essentially every (deidentified) U.S. tax record over a 30-year span, making its findings highly generalizable.
What is the main weakness of Chetty & Hendren’s approach compared to MTO?
Internal validity—without randomized neighborhood assignment, they must rely on quasi-experimental shifts in areas rather than pure randomization.
In Chetty & Hendren’s design, what key assumption allows them to infer causal effects from natural moves?
That the timing of a household’s move relative to a child’s age is unrelated to the characteristics of the destination area.
How do Chetty & Hendren (2018a,b) validate the MTO findings in a broader context?
They show that when any child moves to a location where other children tend to earn more as adults, that child also experiences higher adult earnings—mirroring MTO patterns.
What relationship do they find between duration of childhood exposure to better neighborhoods and adult outcomes?
Improvements in adult outcomes (e.g. earnings) are proportional to the number of years the child spent in the higher-opportunity area during childhood.
How does the population mix in their tax-data study compare to MTO’s sample?
It includes a much wider range of incomes and races/ethnicities, indicating the neighborhood effects apply across diverse groups.
What method do they use to identify the best places for children to grow up?
Analyzing movements across counties and commuting zones to pinpoint which counties causally boost a child’s future earnings.
Which county-level characteristics are most predictive of a place’s causal effect on low-income children’s earnings?
Less concentrated poverty, lower income inequality, higher-quality schools, greater share of two-parent families, lower crime rates.
What is the analytic nature of their county-characteristic evaluation?
It is correlational—they identify which observable place features are most strongly associated with the estimated causal effects from moves.
What key policy insight emerges from Chetty & Hendren’s national work?
That improving neighborhood conditions—especially those five characteristics—could systematically enhance long-run life outcomes for children across the U.S.
