Inequality of Family and Community Characteristics in Relation to Children's Attainments

In this review, we focus on children and their attainments. We begin with the presumption that the increase in family income inequality will have implications for both the level of children’s attainments and the extent of inequality among children in these attainments. Ultimately, our research project will explore these linkages between the increase in family income inequality and the level and distribution of children’s attainments. We plan to study these relationships by comparing inequality in attainments of a generation of children who confronted relatively low levels of inequality in inputs, relative to the inequality of attainments of a later generation of children who confronted relatively higher levels of inequality in these inputs. We plan to do this both through a cross-sectional analysis in which we include measures of levels of parental inputs, such as income and time, community and state inputs, in terms of levels of inputs and measures of inequality at the neighborhood and state levels of aggregation; and also by exploring the nature of these relationships for two cohorts of children who experienced different levels of inequality.