Three Generations of Intergenerational Transmission of Neighbourhood Context

Lina Hedman,Maarten Van Ham

doi:10.17645/si.v9i2.3730

Abstract

The literature on intergenerational contextual mobility has shown that neighbourhood status is partly ‘inherited’ from parents by children. Children who spend their childhood in deprived neighbourhoods are more likely to live in such neighbourhoods as adults. It has been suggested that such transmission of neighbourhood status is also relevant from a multiple generation perspective. To our knowledge, however, this has only been confirmed by simulations and not by empirical research. This study uses actual empirical data covering the entire Swedish population over a 25-year period, to investigate intergenerational similarities in neighbourhood status for three generations of Swedish women. The findings suggest that the neighbourhood environments of Swedish women are correlated with the neighbourhood statuses of their mothers and, to some extent, grandmothers. These results are robust over two different analytical strategies—comparing the neighbourhood status of the three generations at roughly similar ages and at the same point in time—and two different spatial scales. We argue that the finding of such effects in (relatively egalitarian) Sweden implies that similar, and possibly stronger, patterns are likely to exist in other countries as well.

Highlights

The literature on intergenerational transmission suggests that the socio-economic status of children is linked to that of their parents
Using detailed Swedish register data, we investigate the extent to which the neighbourhood statuses of young women are related to the neighbourhood environments of their mothers and grandmothers
We test this by adding the income of the mother and the grandmother to our model. The effect of these income variables is not significant, and the results do not change when removing the share of low-income neighbours of mother/grandmother to avoid collinearity issues. These results suggest, in line with previous results of Sharkey (2008) and Nordvik and Hedman (2019), that intergenerational transmission of neighbourhood status is driven by neighbourhood context rather than income

Summary

Introduction

The literature on intergenerational transmission suggests that the socio-economic status of children is linked to that of their parents. Both using data from Sweden, Gustafson, Katz, and Österberg (2017) and van Ham, Hedman, Manley, Coulter, and Östh (2014) find that the neighbourhood status of children is correlated to that of parents and that immigrants are more likely than natives to remain in disadvantaged areas over two generations. Nordvik and Hedman (2019), argue that in the Norwegian setting, higher education may function as a means of social mobility for people with an immigrant background in particular These studies all support the idea that neighbourhood outcomes are influenced by the residential histories of previous generations and that individual life opportunities are correlated with one’s own neighbourhood experiences and with the experiences of previous generations. Any patterns of multigenerational transmission of neighbourhood status in Sweden are likely to be generalisable to other countries with fewer opportunities for social mobility

Neighbourhood Deprivation and Affluence as Multigenerational Phenomena

Data and Methods

Results

Conclusion