Martha J. Bailey, A.R. Shariq Mohammed, and Paul Mohnen
Working Paper 2026-1
January 2026
Full text 
Abstract:
We construct two new large-scale datasets to measure relative and upward educational mobility by sex, race, class, and childhood county of residence for cohorts born in 1910–1919 and 1982–1997. We show that both relative and upward educational mobility rose over the 20th century, with historically disadvantaged groups experiencing the largest gains. We also document substantial geographic convergence over the 20th century: both within and across regions, where children live matters much less for their educational mobility today than it did at midcentury. Using a state-border design, we show that greater public investments in primary and secondary education were an important driver of upward educational mobility in the early and late 20th century, but public investments in postsecondary education emerged as a similarly important determinant in the late 20th century.
JEL classification: J62, I24, I28, N32
Key words: education, inequality, intergenerational mobility
https://doi.org/10.29338/wp2026-01
Martha J. Bailey (marthabailey@g.ucla.edu) is a professor of economics and director of the California Center for Population Research at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. A.R. Shariq Mohammed (ab.mohammed@northeastern.edu) is an assistant professor of economics at Northeastern University. Paul Mohnen (paul.mohnen@atl.frb.org) is a research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. For helpful comments, the authors thank Dan Aaronson, Sandy Black, Marcus Casey, Dan Fetter, Sasha Indarte, Bhash Mazumder, Matt Staiger, Bryan Stuart, and participants at the ASSA, Atlanta Fed, Cliometrics, EHA, Equitable Growth, NBER Development of the American Economy, NBER Summer Institute, RNIM, SOLE, Philadelphia Fed, UCLA, and University of Pennsylvania. They thank Alex Coblin, Jordan Cammarota, Kelsey Figone, Deniz Gorgulu, David Lee, Avinash Reddy, Joaquín Serrano, Eric Wang, and Mengying Zhang for excellent research assistance. They also thank Jonathan Rothbaum and Hui Ren Tan for sharing their estimates, and James Feigenbaum for sharing the linked Iowa-1940 Census data. They thank Caleb Floyd for guidance with the disclosure process. The LIFE-M project was generously supported by the National Science Foundation (SMA 1539228), the National Institute on Aging (R21 AG05691201), the University of Michigan Population Studies Center Small Grants (R24 HD041028), the Michigan Center for the Demography of Aging (MiCDA, P30 AG012846-21), the University of Michigan Associate Professor Fund, the Michigan Institute on Research and Teaching in Economics (MITRE), the Russell Sage Foundation (1911-19560), and the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. They gratefully acknowledge the use of the Population Studies Center’s services and facilities at the University of Michigan (P2CHD041028) and the California Center for Population Research at UCLA (P2CHD041022). The Census Bureau has reviewed this data product to ensure appropriate access, use, and disclosure avoidance protection of the confidential source data used to produce this product. This research was performed at a Federal Statistical Research Data Center under FSRDC Project Number 2548 (CBDRB-FY24-0379, CBDRB-FY25-12440). The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, the Federal Reserve System, or the US Census Bureau.
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