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We characterize rates of intergenerational income mobility at each college in the United States using administrative data for over 30 million college students from 1999-2013. We document four results. First, access to colleges varies greatly by parent income. For example, children whose parents are in the top 1% of the income distribution are 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than those whose parents are in the bottom income quintile. Second, children from low and high-income families have very similar earnings outcomes conditional on the college they attend, indicating that there is little mismatch of low socioeconomic status students to selective colleges. Third, upward mobility rates – measured, for instance, by the fraction of students who come from families in the bottom income quintile and reach the top quintile – vary substantially across colleges. Much of this variation is driven by di↵erences in the fraction of students from low-income families across colleges whose students have similar earnings outcomes. Mid-tier public universities such as the City University of New York and California State colleges tend to have the highest rates of bottom-to-top quintile mobility.

An overview of the Golden State’s tax structure

As the largest sector within the nation’s clean energy economy, energy efficiency accounts for about three out of every four American clean energy jobs. In total, these technologies support almost 1.9 million jobs across the country, and 889,050 of these workers spend the majority of their time supporting the energy efficiency portion of their business.2 Employers across the roughly 165,000 establishments that conduct energy efficiency work are optimistic about business growth, projecting a collective 13 percent employment growth rate over 2016—or an additional 245,000 jobs.

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.     

Many believe the current tax system does not serve California as well as it might, and that a review of the entire structure is long overdue. Post – Proposition 13 revenues from the sales and use tax, the corporation tax, and the property tax have diminished. This has increased California’s dependence on the personal income tax. The increasing volatility of the state’s economy (and the stock market) has translated into greater unpredictability of state tax revenue, presenting challenges for budget forecasts.

Income inequality has been growing for decades, in California and the nation as a whole. In recent years, inequality—and the role of policy in addressing it—has become a major focus of public debate. This report documents the polarization of incomes across the state and shows how social safety net programs mitigate inequality.

The Failure to Act report series answers this key question — how does the nation’s failure to act to improve the condition of U.S. infrastructure systems affect the nation’s economic performance? In 2011 and 2012, ASCE released four Failure to Act reports in a series covering 10 infrastructure sectors that are critical to the economic prosperity of the U.S.

States’ actual expenditures for OPEB totaled $18.4 billion in 2013, or 1.6 percent of state-generated revenue. . . . If states had instead set aside the amount suggested by actuaries to pay for OPEB liabilities, their total payments that year would have more than doubled to $48 billion—4 percent of state-generated revenue—and spending to fully fund OPEB obligations would have outpaced what states contributed to active state employee health premiums.

Higher Education in California

California’s statewide housing growth, as measured by net unit growth in completed housing units for 2015, was largely flat from the previous year. Although net units were down 3 percent (67,110 net housing units compared to 69,435 net units in 2014), wildfires accounted for most of the decline. The losses to fire were most significant in unincorporated portions of Lake County (1,531) and Calaveras County (549).

The Milken Institute’s fourth annual California Summit provided an opportunity to assemble prominent state leaders in business, policy, philanthropy, and academia to address the issues facing the world’s seventh-largest economy and one of the most diverse populations on the globe. Held December 8, 2015, at the Ritz-Carlton in Marina del Rey, the Summit focused on four key areas that define many of the challenges facing the state: the business climate; the need for opportunities in finance and access to capital, including financial technology; investment in the state’s infrastructure, particularly involving water; and the need to maintain and grow the culture of innovation.

New sources of labor should be top of mind for CEOs as they contemplate protracted labor shortages. These shortages will hit most industries, pinching profits and prolonging the economic slowdown. . . An unprecedented confluence of trends—historically low productivity growth and massive baby boomer retirements—has set the stage for shortages that will hit across regions and industries.

While the most current complete tax data from the Franchise Tax Board is for 2013, the recently published zip code data enables some preliminary analysis for the 2014 receipts. By region, 40.3% of PIT revenues came from the Bay Area. More importantly, 51.2% of the increased PIT revenues in 2014 came from this region, once again illustrating how much California is reliant on a single region not only for continued jobs and employment growth, but the continued health of the state’s fiscal situation. Los Angeles, with 30% of the population, was the next largest region, paying 27.5% of total PIT and a 25.5% share of the increased PIT receipts. In the absence of state policies that promote more balanced and geographically dispersed jobs growth, California’s finances will likely continue to be reliant on the economic health of one region.

In total, the study covers 564 state and local systems in the United States that reported $1.91 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities under GASB 67 in FY 2014. The analysis reveals that, despite well-performing markets from 2009 to 2014, state and local government pension systems are underwater by $3.4 trillion and that the true cost of keeping pension liabilities from rising is 17.5 percent of state and local budgets. Even contributions of those magnitudes would not begin to pay down the trillions of dollars of unfunded legacy liabilities; they would simply stop the unfunded liability from rising.

The proposed spending is more than double the $3.09 billion in cap-and-trade auction spending included in Governor Jerry Brown’s proposed budget, and comes at a time when the spending of auction revenue is under scrutiny. The auctions are generating billions of dollars a year for programs that are unrelated to those who are required to pay, but the process was not approved by a two-thirds majority of lawmakers, as the California Constitution requires for tax increases.