Abstract
Theories about neighbours’ influence on children’s education that are based on social capital, cohesion and disorganisation stress the importance of neighbourhood stability. This is because stability is regarded as necessary for building strong ties and friendships, which in turn affect educational outcomes. However, amongst the vast number of studies on the effect of neighbours on a child’s education, none has tested whether neighbourhood stability matters. We fill this gap by estimating the causal effect of residential turnover on student test score gains. Estimation is based on administrative data on four cohorts of secondary school students in England, allowing us to control for pupil-level, neighbourhood-level and school-by-cohort level unobservables and for changes in neighbourhood composition driven by students’ residential mobility. We show that a high turnover of same-school-grade students reduces value-added for teenagers who stay in their neighbourhood, although turnover of other age groups does not matter. These results coupled with auxiliary findings based on survey data suggest that neighbours’ turnover damages education through the disruption of local ties and friendships, highlighting a so-far undiscovered spillover of mobility.
Highlights
Geographical mobility is generally considered essential for the functioning of efficient markets
Our identifying assumption in estimating equation (1) is that the cohortto-cohort changes in small-scale neighbourhood, cohort-specific residential turnover are uncorrelated with the unobserved determinants of student achievement, once we condition on neighbourhood, school, and cohort fixed effects, and control for a broad set of pupil and neighbourhood time-varying observables
The main estimation sample has 1.2 million students evenly spaced over four cohorts and living in around 133,000 output areas (OAs)
Summary
Our analysis is based on state-school students in England during the first three years of their secondary education. For the remaining students who move over the grade 6 to 9 period, we still have complete information on place of residence, characteristics, and test scores We use these students to construct neighbourhood turnover rates specific to each cohort, as well as changes in the neighbourhood composition between grade 6 and 9 driven by this residential mobility. In the last part of our analysis, we make use of the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE), which samples approximately 14,000 students aged 14 in 2004 in 800 schools, and follows them as they progress through their secondary education up to age 16 and beyond This set of pupils belongs to a cohort that is one-year older than the first cohort included in our main sample. The section discusses the empirical specifications we use to estimate the effects of neighbourhood turnover on these students’ outcomes
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