At the close of World War II, “development” began to evolve along two paths. On the first path, scholars aimed to generate theoretical understandings of social change, especially at the national level (development studies). On the second path, policy makers in governments and other development-focused organizations initiated actions to promote positive social change, especially in poor or war-torn nations (development practice). In this article, we review the recent trajectory of “development” in sociology, paying close attention to the intersections between development studies and development practice. Through explicit comparisons to economics and political science, we demonstrate how the prominence of development sociology has varied historically in relation to its proposed policy prescriptions. We conclude by highlighting five uniquely sociological contributions that could powerfully improve contemporary interdisciplinary development conversations, and by calling for greater sociological attention to the complex ways in which a growing transnational field of development practitioners is shaping a multiplicity of development outcomes.

A growing body of research documents the importance of wealth and the racial wealth gap in perpetuating inequality across generations. We examine the impact of wealth on child income. Our two-stage least squares regressions reveal that grandparental wealth has an important effect on the younger generation's stock, which in turn affects the younger generation's household income. We further explore the relationship between income and wealth by decomposing the child's income by race. We find that the intergroup disparity in income is mainly attributable to differences in family background. These findings indicate that wealth is an important source of income inequality.

2. A full review of the impact of place-based policies is beyond the scope of this article (see Glaeser and Gottlieb 2008;Kline and Moretti 2014;Neumark and Simpson 2015). Most research, however, finds modest short-run effects on a limited set of outcomes that are closely related to the domain of the intervention, such as housing, economic development, or crime (Braga et al. 2001;Busso, Gregory, and Kline 2013;Tach and Emory 2017). 3. States and local jurisdictions have also used place-based targeting initiatives. Future research should consider whether state and local initiatives complement or supplement federal funding.

New data reveal significant variation in economic mobility outcomes across U.S. localities. This suggests that social structures, institutions, and public policies-particularly those that influence critical early-life environments-play an important role in shaping mobility processes. Using new county-level estimates of intergenerational economic mobility for children born between 1980 and 1986, we exploit the uneven expansions of Medicaid eligibility across states to isolate the causal effect of this specific policy change on mobility outcomes. Instrumental-variable regression models reveal that increasing the proportion of low-income pregnant women eligible for Medicaid improved the mobility outcomes of their children in adulthood. We find no evidence that Medicaid coverage in later childhood years influences mobility outcomes. This study has implications for the normative evaluation of this policy intervention as well as our understanding of mobility processes in an era of rising inequality.

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