10/15/2026

News

Income Mobility in California Across Generations

The evidence in this report suggests that Californian children have higher rates of income mobility because of their parents’ and their own characteristics, not because growing up in California results in more mobility. On average, growing up in California results in somewhat lower adult earnings for children compared to living elsewhere in the United States. . . According to the Chetty and Hendren estimates, had these children grown up somewhere else, they would have experienced slightly greater upward income mobility. . . While growing up in California results in lower future earnings for low–income children on average, there is a great deal of variation in these outcomes at a local level. Within California, growing up in a particular county can increase or decrease a child’s future annual income by a couple of thousand dollars.

Research & Studies
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Dan Walters: California’s economy has recovered, but overdue for a budget-busting recession

The technology-heavy San Francisco Bay Area has almost single-handedly lifted California’s economy and while other regions are better off than they were during the depths of the recession, their recoveries have been more sluggish.

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US GDP Growth Estimate for Q3 Rises to 3.5%

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) on Thursday issued its final revision for third-quarter gross domestic product (GDP). According to the BEA, U.S. GDP rose at an inflation-adjusted and seasonally adjusted rate of 3.5%, higher than the October estimate of 2.9% and the November estimate of 3.2%.

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Barely Half of 30-Year-Olds Earn More Than Their Parents

Barely half of 30-year-olds earn more than their parents did at a similar age, a research team found, an enormous decline from the early 1970s when the incomes of nearly all offspring outpaced their parents. Even rapid economic growth won’t do much to reverse the trend.

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California GDP growth lags

“Real gross domestic product increased by 2.2 percent in California in the second quarter of 2016, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis says Wednesday. That puts California in the second tier of states for GDP growth. Rival Texas saw its GDP actually drop, down 0.2 percent, the BEA says.”

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Corporate Earnings, U.S. GDP Experience Stout Expansions

The Commerce Department on Tuesday reported that a key measure of business earnings—profits after tax without inventory valuation and capital consumption adjustments—rose 3.5% from the second quarter, its third straight quarterly increase. . . Tuesday’s report also showed that gross domestic product, a broad measure of the goods and services produced across the economy, expanded at an inflation- and seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.2% in the third quarter, the strongest growth in two years.

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The Fading American Dream: Trends In Absolute Income Mobility Since 1940

We estimate rates of “absolute income mobility” – the fraction of children who earn more than their parents – by combining historical data from Census and CPS cross-sections with panel data for recent birth cohorts from de-identified tax records. Our approach overcomes the key data limitation that has hampered research on trends in intergenerational mobility: the lack of large panel datasets linking parents and children. We find that rates of absolute mobility have fallen from approximately 90%for children born in 1940 to 50% for children born in the 1980s. The result that absolute mobility has fallen sharply over the past half century is robust to the choice of price deflator, the definition of income, and accounting for taxes and transfers. In counterfactual simulations, we find that increasing GDP growth rates alone cannot restore absolute mobility to the rates experienced by children born in the 1940s. In contrast, changing the distribution of growth across income groups to the more equal distribution experienced by the 1940 birth cohort would reverse more than 70% of the decline in mobility. These results imply that reviving the “American Dream” of high rates of absolute mobility would require economic growth that is spread more broadly across the income distribution.     

Research & Studies
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U.S. Consumer Spending, Incomes Rose Steadily in October

Americans’ incomes and household spending advanced at a solid pace for the second straight month in October, suggesting consumers can support economic growth in the year’s final months.

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Beige Book–November 30, 2016

Economic activity in the District continued to expand at a moderate pace during the reporting period of early October through mid-November. Overall price inflation was limited, while upward wage pressures increased further. Sales of retail goods continued to expand at a moderate pace, and growth in the consumer and business services sectors was solid. Manufacturing activity changed little on balance. Agricultural yields and sales grew further. Activity in the residential and commercial real estate sectors remained high. Lending activity expanded moderately.

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Tearing Down American Dream Boundaries: An Imperative

Progressive politicians, dominant in California, talk incessantly about housing affordability, but blindly pursue policies that will make things even worse. It should not be surprising that the housing-cost adjusted poverty rate in California is the worst in union, underperforming even Mississippi. It should also not be surprising that Californians of every age group, including Millennials, are leaving state in larger numbers than they are being attracted.

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Is Growth in the Gig Economy Stalling Out?

Just as we’ve started to get a handle on the ways online sharing platforms such as Uber and Airbnb are changing the nature of work in the U.S., it appears growth on the platforms may be slowing.

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California jumps the shark

California is on the road to a bifurcated, almost feudal, society, divided by geography, race and class. As is clear from the most recent Internal Revenue Service data, it’s not just the poor and ill-educated, as Brown apologists suggest, but, rather, primarily young families and the middle-aged, who are leaving. What will be left is a state dominated by a growing, but relatively small, upper class, many of them boomers; young singles and a massive, growing, increasingly marginalized “precariat” of low wage, often occasional, workers.

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Economic Participation Matters Most

The best way up for people is — and always has been — the capacity to participate in the economy as an employee, entrepreneur, or owner. No amount of redistributive policy can achieve the same result. The safety net, as the name implies, is to prevent downward mobility; it has never been a very good trampoline.

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Study: Nearly 58 percent of Fresno renters ‘cost-burdened’

Fresno is No. 7 on the 19-city list for cost-burdened renters, with 57.75 percent percent of renters paying more than 30 percent of their income on rent. The Stockton-Lodi region comes in at 56.84 percent for the No. 9 spot, while Modesto ranks 16th with 54.37 percent.

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Short Term Rentals: Are They Really Impacting Housing Supply and Neighborhood Safety?

However, we did not find that the supply of housing was significantly affected by the incidence of short-term rentals in the City or County of Santa Barbara. This is because (1) compared to the total size of the housing stock, there are very few STRs in Santa Barbara City and County, and (2) very few of these homes are used as STRs full-time. . . Overall, we found that an STR ban across Santa Barbara County would increase the housing supply for local residents by only 0.1%.

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