Charts of the week: Absolute mobility, regional prosperity, and employment rates among adults with disabilities

Click on any of the links to access the full research.

The decline of American’s absolute mobility

Citing research from Raj Chetty and his team of researchers, Richard Reeves and Katherine Guyot discuss the drop in American’s absolute mobility, which the authors define as “the share of children with higher inflation-adjusted incomes than their parents,” and which income brackets and birth cohorts it has affected the most. Below, Reeves and Guyot use Chetty’s data to compare absolute mobility across income distributions.

Cities are powering economic prosperity around the world

To address whether the prosperity gap between rural and metropolitan areas is unique to the United States, Joseph Parilla and Sifan Liu, contributors to the 2018 Global Metro Monitor, analyze how GDP per capita and other measures of economic activity vary between cities and their surrounding areas in different regions of the world. They chart some of their data below and describe the nature of regional disparities in their latest blog post.

Where are the highest employment rates for Americans with disabilities highest?

Martha Ross and Nicole Bateman from the Metropolitan Policy Program use American Community Survey data to show how employment rates among Americans with disabilities vary across the country. In their analysis they find that only 40 percent of prime working aged adults with disabilities are employed, down from 79 percent of all adults of the same age range. Their research also suggests that employment rates among those with disabilities tend to be lower in metropolitan areas with low unemployment rates overall, but large variance within that categorization remains.

The map below illustrates some of the metropolitan areas with particularly high and low employment rates for working-age adults with disabilities.