Extended Data Fig. 5: Association between Economic Connectedness and Counties’ Causal Effects on Upward Income Mobility.

This figure presents a binned scatter plot of counties’ causal effects on upward mobility against economic connectedness. The binned scatter plot is constructed in the same way as described in the notes to Extended Data Figure 4, using 20 bins of Economic Connectedness instead of 10 and weighting by the precision (inverse of standard error squared) of the causal effect estimates. Causal effects on upward mobility are the annual exposure effect estimates constructed by Chetty and Hendren⁷⁴ by analyzing cross-county movers. These annual exposure effects are multiplied by 20 so that they can be interpreted as the causal effect of growing up in a given location from birth to age 20 on an individual’s household income percentile rank in adulthood. The slope is estimated using an OLS regression of the causal effect estimates on EC, weighting by the precision of the causal effect estimates. The signal correlation is calculated by dividing the raw (precision-weighted) correlation between the causal effects and EC by the square root of the precision-weighted reliability of the estimated causal effects.