Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Roundtable: Use of Large-Scale Data to Assess Social Mobility

(Tools of Analysis: Methods, Data, Informatics and Research Design)

Social and economic mobility has long been the cornerstone of American economic democracy - “The American Dream.” Although many suspect mobility in the U.S. is historically low, there are little data to test whether social mobility is low or has, indeed, declined. This Roundtable will present four data projects that create data to examine the changes in socio-economic mobility over time and space. Participants in this Roundtable will demonstrate the importance of their data in evaluating policies that impact socio-economic mobility over time and changes in the well-being of American families. Current and previous APPAM Presidents have stressed that the big data revolution – facilitating analysis of large-scale data sets drawn from administrative records or linked records from multiple sources -- will form the future of evidence-based policymaking. The creation of these integrated data sources will also provide essential input for the new Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking. The purpose of the Commission is to evaluate survey and administrative sources to “...facilitate program evaluation, continuous improvement, policy-relevant research, and cost-benefit analyses by qualified researchers and institutions.” The four data projects include: • The American Opportunity Study (AOS), which will locate individual records in the 1990 long form census and then track the same individuals into the 2000-2010 decennial censuses, the American Community Surveys (ACS), and ultimately future decennial censuses and American Community Surveys. • The Census Bureau’s CLIP (Census Longitudinal Infrastructure Project), which creates a longitudinal data set by linking the 2000 and 2010 Census to later ACS data, other survey data, and administrative data, with plans to link the 1940 Census. • The Longitudinal, Intergenerational Family Electronic Micro-Database (LIFE-M), which uses vital records linked to Census data to describe the intergenerational transmission of socio-economic inequality for the first two thirds of the 20th century (before the PSID begins). • The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), which has been the cornerstone survey used to evaluate socio-economic mobility (using income, earnings, education, or occupation), following the same families since 1968, their offspring and split-offs. The Roundtable consists of Timothy Smeeding, Lee Rainwater Distinguished Professor of Public Affairs and Economics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and one of the founders of the AOS; Martha Bailey, Associate Professor of Economics and Research Associate Professor at the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan and PI for LIFE-M; Amy O’Hara, Chief of the Center for Administrative Records Research and Applications at the US Census Bureau; David Johnson, the Deputy Director of the PSID and Research Professor at the University of Michigan. Bruce Meyer, McCormick Foundation Professor at Chicago Harris School, who has been actively involved in the development of the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking, will moderate the session. Together, these innovative data products, along with survey data, will provide researchers and policy makers a resource of unparalleled statistical power; an opportunity for causal research on an exceptional scale; and a source of data for a wide variety of problems unprecedented in the social and behavioral sciences.