Extended Data Fig. 6: Associations between Upward Income Mobility and Economic Connectedness for Low-SES and High-SES Individuals.

This figure presents binned scatter plots of children’s predicted income ranks in adulthood against cross-SES connectedness by county, separately for children with low-income (25th percentile) parents and high-income (75th percentile) parents. Data on children’s outcomes are obtained from the Opportunity Atlas⁷². We define cross-SES connectedness as the normalized share of friends for an individual in one SES group who belong to the other SES group. For below-median SES individuals, cross-SES connectedness is the same as our baseline definition of economic connectedness. Hence, the series in orange circles in Panel A is a binned scatter plot analog of Fig. 4, pooling data from all counties (see notes to Extended Data Figure 4 for details on construction of binned scatter plots). For above-median-SES individuals, cross-SES connectedness is twice the share of their friends who are low-SES. Panel B replicates Panel A, controlling for the share of high-SES individuals in each county. The series in Panel B are constructed by first residualizing predicted household income ranks and cross-SES connectedness on the share of high-SES people using univariate OLS regressions, and then constructing a binned scatter plot of the residuals after adding back the means of each variable for scaling purposes. We report estimates of the slope of each series based on OLS regressions with standard errors, clustered by commuting zone, in parentheses.