Cumulative exposure to disadvantage and the intergenerational transmission of neighbourhood effects

Abstract

Studies of neighbourhood effects typically investigate the instantaneous effect of point-in-time measures of neighbourhood poverty on individual outcomes. It has been suggested that it is not solely the current neighbourhood, but also the neigh-bourhood history of an individual that is important in determining an individual’s outcomes. The effect of long-term exposure to poverty neighbourhoods on adults has largely been ignored in the empirical literature, partly due to a lack of suitable data. Using a population of parental home-leavers in Stockholm, Sweden, this study is innovative in investigating the effects of two temporal dimensions of exposure to neighbourhood environments on personal income later in life: the parental neigh-bourhood at the time of leaving the home and the cumulative exposure to poverty neighbourhoods in the subsequent 17 years. Using unique longitudinal Swedish reg-ister data and bespoke individual neighbourhoods, we are the first to employ a hy-brid model, which combines both random and fixed effects approaches, in a study of neighbourhood effects. We find independent and non-trivial effects on income of the parental neighbourhood and cumulative exposure to poverty concentration neigh-bourhoods. The intergenerational transmission and exposure effects suggest the need for a more dynamic formulation of the neighbourhood effects hypothesis which explicitly takes temporal dimensions into account.OTB Research Institute for the Built Environmen