CPRC Seminar Series with Professor Kerwin Charles
We develop a theoretical framework in which segregation, discrimination, and other racialized processes make intergenerational mobility a function of the capital available to one’s broader racial/ethnic group, as in Borjas (1992). We show that racial capital systematically slows the speed of generational convergence for historically unequal groups and that, for any particular racial group, its impact is directly related to the social salience of race in society. We estimate empirical models of intergenerational mobility using data from Opportunity Insights and the NLSY for Asian, Black, Hispanic, and white children born around 1980. Racial capital at the neighborhood and, especially, the metropolitan area levels has a substantial role in explaining Black-white education, income, and employment gaps. It matters about half as much for Hispanic white differences and very little for Asian-white differences. The inclusion of racial capital in the model sharply closes, and in many cases reverses, the Black-white and Hispanic-white intergenerational mobility gaps documented in Chetty et al. (2020). These results imply that (i) observed racial outcome gaps are largely a function of historical inequities in available capital (more broadly construed here to include neighborhood/ metro racial capital in addition to one’s own parents) and (ii) racial capital– and, more fundamentally, the continued social salience of race – plays a crucial role in explaining the historically slow speed of generational convergence to Black-white equality in the United States. Relative to existing estimates, our results are more suggestive of the eventual convergence to racial equality, albeit at a glacial pace.
Kerwin Charles joined Yale in 2019 as the Indra K. Nooyi Dean & Frederick W. Beinecke Professor of Economics, Policy, and Management at the Yale School of Management (SOM). He moved to Yale from the University of Chicago, where he was the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergmann Distinguished Service professor. He has studied and published on a range of topics in labor and applied economics. Among other professional duties, he has served as the vice president of the American Economics Association and is on the Board of several academic and nonprofit entities. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is an elected Fellow of the Society of Labor Economics; of the American Academy of Political and Social Science; and of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
