The Earned Income Tax Credit, Migrating Out of Rural America, and Moving to Opportunity

Recent research shows that economic opportunity is distributed unevenly by geography and that economic convergence across regions has diminished. Economically distressed areas are often rural and have experienced decreased labor force participation, decreased health, and increased deaths of despair. Two long-standing research questions are whether assistance should be focused on distressed places or the people in these places and whether or not policy should nudge people in distressed places to migrate to areas with more economic opportunity. Economist Jacob Bastian will examine the extent to which the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) affects migration out of rural and economically distressed regions. He will examine: 1) how the EITC has affected migration; 2) the traits of the places that families migrate to and from (e.g., census tract average education, employment, income, mobility, and incarceration rates); 3) how the EITC affects the composition of the population remaining in rural areas, and the extent to which it changes residential segregation by race, immigration, and poverty status; and 4) the long-run effects on mothers and children, including having health insurance,  disability status, educational attainment, college enrollment, labor supply, income, and marriage and fertility. The investigator will analyze the restricted versions of the 2000 Census and 2001-2019 American Community Survey (ACS) data, which report data for Census Blocks and Tracts.