The Echo of Neighborhood Disadvantage: Multigenerational Contextual Hardship and Adult Income for Whites, Blacks, and Latinos

Abstract

Drawing on 35 years of restricted geocoded National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) data, we estimate the association between multigenerational exposure to neighborhood disadvantage in childhood and income in adulthood. Invoking cousin fixed effects models that adjust for unobserved legacies of disadvantage that cascade across generations, we find that families where both mothers and their children are exposed to childhood neighborhood disadvantage yield reduced earnings, net of observed and unobserved confounders, for all groups except for Blacks. We theorize that discrimination and racism salient for Blacks in the labor market may dim the ability of neighborhood attainment to act as a main pathway to social and economic mobility. These results push scholars to conceptualize neighborhoods as much more durable features of inequality and refine our understanding of the uneven economic returns to neighborhood attainment across race and ethnicity.