Abstract
Previous research has reported evidence of intergenerational transmissions of neighbourhood status and social and economic outcomes later in life. Research also shows neighbourhood effects on adult incomes of both childhood and adult neighbourhood experiences. However, these estimates of neighbourhood effects may be biased because confounding factors originating from the childhood family context. It is likely that part of the neighbourhood effects observed for adults, are actually lingering effects of the family in which someone grew up. This study uses a sibling design to disentangle family and neighbourhood effects on income, with contextual sibling pairs used as a control group. The sibling design helps us to separate the effects of childhood family and neighbourhood context from adult neighbourhood experiences. Using data from Swedish population registers, including the full Swedish population, we show that the neighbourhood effect on income from both childhood and adult neighbourhood experiences, is biased upwards by the influence of the childhood family context. Ultimately, we conclude that there is a neighbourhood effect on income from adult neighbourhood experiences, but that the childhood neighbourhood effect is actually a childhood family context effect. We find that there is a long lasting effect of the family context on income later in life, and that this effect is strong regardless the individual neighbourhood pathway later in life.
Highlights
There is an emerging body of literature that highlights the importance of taking into account the neighbourhood in which an individual grew up as a means to understand their later in life trajectories
Contrary to much previous work on neighbourhood effects, but in line with the (Scandinavian) economic literature using sibling comparisons, we find that the childhood neighbourhood has only a very limited effect on future income whereas the family context plays a major role
The results suggest that there is an adulthood neighbourhood effect on income from work, net of the effect of the childhood neighbourhood and childhood family context effects
Summary
There is an emerging body of literature that highlights the importance of taking into account the neighbourhood in which an individual grew up as a means to understand their later in life trajectories. Empirical evidence suggests that there is a correlation between the neighbourhood types experienced during childhood and the neighbourhoods where one lives in adulthood [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Other studies show that the neighbourhood environment experienced during. Using sibling data to explore the impact of neighbourhood histories and childhood family context on income. For further information about the data access please see https://www.ibf.uu.se/research/our-researchers/ geosweden/. The authors confirm they accessed the data in the same manner and did not have special access privileges
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