California’s Geography of Opportunity: Intergenerational Mobility in the Golden State

In anticipation of the next twenty-five years of civil rights policy in California, this work investigates social mobility in the Golden State between the last two generations to gain insight into which groups could be best served by civil rights policy interventions (the first aim of the paper). This study used a publicly accessible database created by Opportunity Insights which employed data from the U.S. Census Bureau and Internal Revenue Service (Chetty, Hendren, Kline, & Saez, 2014; Chetty, Hendren, Kline, Saez, & Turner, 2014) to geospatially analyze the social mobility of children born in the Golden State relative to their parents. Furthermore, this study leverages a complementary dataset from IPUMS USA (Ruggles, 2019) to provide evidence that Hispanic and Asian mobility is likely mischaracterized in California when non-legal permanent residents (non-LPR) are excluded.