Spatial poverty dynamics and social mobility in rural America

Abstract

Rural America is often depicted as a distressed and left-behind place, with limited opportunities for the children growing up there. This paper addresses this topic by examining the dynamics of rural places over the past four decades and how these changes impact the economic mobility of children raised in poor rural households. Employing a place-based framework, we utilise sequence analysis to identify dominant trajectories of change for more than 8000 rural communities. Our analysis reveals highly diverse community trajectories that connect deindustrialisation and racial inequality to elevated and rising poverty rates in certain places, while also documenting more favourable poverty trends elsewhere. These diverging local outcomes shed new light on the conflicting narratives surrounding rural America. We then demonstrate that, among children from poorer households, exposure to community poverty is predictive of adult economic mobility, patterns which are partly mediated by family stability and child poverty. Our finding that poor children face additional disadvantages when they also grow up in poor places suggests a potential role for place-based policies and redistribution to help ameliorate these disparities.