ABSTRACT

Over the past decade, Opportunity Insights (OI) has transformed the study of intergenerational mobility through innovative uses of administrative data, reshaping the public and scholarly understanding of the factors that affect children’s life prospects. One consistent finding in this literature is the strong association between family structure, especially single parenthood, and upward mobility, though it has received relatively little sustained attention. This report systematically reviews 11 major OI studies to assess how family structure enters their analyses, how it is interpreted, and what conclusions can and cannot be drawn from the existing evidence. We show that across geographic units ranging from commuting zones to census tracts, rates of single parenthood are among the strongest correlates of upward mobility, often rivaling or exceeding other widely emphasized factors such as school quality, income inequality, and social capital. At the same time, OI’s reliance on mobility measures that condition on parental income, along with onetime measures of family structure, likely understates the importance of growing up with a single parent at the family level and complicates interpretation of community-level results. We conclude that family structure is plausibly a central mechanism shaping economic mobility, both directly and through its influence on parental income, neighborhood composition, and adult outcomes such as marriage. We outline directions for future research to assess the role of family structure in the transmission of economic advantage and disadvantage.