Author
If you live in a Ninth District state, which do you prefer, moving out or moving up? Probably the former if you don’t like the cold, but likely the latter in most other cases. And while Ninth District states have cold winters, so too do they offer better upward income mobility than the nation overall, according to data from a team of researchers from Harvard and UC-Berkeley.
The research project, dubbed Equality of Opportunity, collected income data on millions of parents in the last half of the 1990s. It then tracked how kids from low-income families in this sample fared in 2011 and 2012, when they were in their early 30s. (For more information on the study’s methodology, go here.)
The study split the country into more than 700 commuting zones, which are rough approximations of local economies (urban and rural). It then ranked commuting zones for absolute upward mobility—roughly, the average national income rank of a child from low-income parents in the commuting zone.
The data show that Ninth District states stand out for high absolute upward mobility. The distribution of scores for commuting zones in every district state (including the combined region of northwestern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan) skewed higher than scores for all other commuting zones not in the Ninth District (see charts below).
For more data and discussion on this topic, see the October fedgazette for in-depth articles on both high income mobility and low income mobility in the Ninth District.
Ron Wirtz is a Minneapolis Fed regional outreach director. Ron tracks current business conditions, with a focus on employment and wages, construction, real estate, consumer spending, and tourism. In this role, he networks with businesses in the Bank’s six-state region and gives frequent speeches on economic conditions. Follow him on Twitter @RonWirtz.
