We show that the neighborhoods in which children grow up play a significant role in determining their earnings, college attendance rates, and fertility and marriage rates by studying more than 7 million families who move across commuting zones in the U.S. By exploiting variation in the age of children when families move, we find that neighborhoods have significant childhood exposure effects: the outcomes of children whose families move to a better neighborhood - as measured by the outcomes of children already living there - improve linearly in proportion to the time they spend growing up in that area, at a rate of approximately 4% per year of exposure. We distinguish the causal effects of neighborhoods from confounding factors by comparing the outcomes of siblings within families, studying moves triggered by displacement shocks, and exploiting sharp variation in predicted place effects across birth cohorts, genders, and quantiles to implement overidentification tests. The findings show that place affects intergenerational mobility primarily through childhood exposure, helping reconcile conflicting results in the prior literature.
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