Neighbourhood effects on educational attainment. What matters more: Exposure to poverty or exposure to affluence?

Neighbourhood effects studies typically investigate the negative effects on individual outcomes of living in areas with concentrated poverty. The literature rarely pays attention to the potential beneficial effects of living in areas with concentrated affluence. This poverty paradigm might hinder our understanding of spatial context effects. Our paper uses individual geocoded data from the Netherlands to compare the effects of exposure to neighbourhood affluence and poverty on educational attainment within the same statistical models. Using bespoke neighbourhoods, we create individual neighbourhood histories which allow us to distinguish exposure effects from early childhood and adolescence. We follow an entire cohort born in 1995 and we measure their educational level in 2018. The results show that, in the Netherlands, neighbourhood affluence has a stronger effect on educational attainment than neighbourhood poverty for all the time periods studied. Additionally, interactions with parental education indicate that children with higher educated parents are not affected by neighbourhood poverty. These results highlight the need for more studies on the effects of concentrated affluence and can inspire anti-segregation policies.

Multiscale Contextual Poverty in the Netherlands: Within and Between-Municipality Inequality.

Contextual poverty refers to high proportions of people with a low income in a certain (residential) space, and it can affect individual socioeconomic outcomes as well as decisions to move into or out of the neighbourhood. Contextual poverty is a multiscale phenomenon: Poverty levels at the regional scale reflect regional economic development, while meso-scale concentrations of poverty within cities are related to city-specific social, economic and housing characteristics. Within cities, poverty can also concentrate at micro spatial scales, which are often neglected, largely due to a lack of data. Exposure to poverty at lower spatial scales, such as housing blocks and streets, is important because it can influence individuals through social mechanisms such as role models or social networks. This paper is based on the premise that sociospatial context is necessarily multiscalar, and therefore contextual poverty is a multiscale problem which can be better understood through the inequality within and between places at different spatial scales. The question is how to compare different spatial contexts if we know that they include various spatial scales. Our measure of contextual poverty embraces 101 spatial scales and compares different locations within and between municipalities in the Netherlands. We found that the national inequality primarily came from the concentrations of poverty in areas of a few kilometres, located in cities, which have different spatial patterns of contextual poverty, such as multicentre, core-periphery and east-west. In addition to the inequality between municipalities, there are considerable within-municipality inequalities, particularly among micro-areas of a few hundred metres.

Changing occupational structures and residential segregation in New York, London and Tokyo.

Based on data from the 1980s, Sassen's influential book 'The Global City' interrogated how changes in the occupational structure affect socio-economic residential segregation in global cities. Here, using data for New York City, London and Tokyo, we reframe and answer this question for recent decades. Our analysis shows an increase in the share of high-income occupations, accompanied by a fall in low-income occupations in all three cities, providing strong evidence for a consistent trend of professionalization of the workforce. Segregation was highest in New York and lowest in Tokyo. In New York and London, individuals in high-income occupations are concentrating in the city centre, while low-income occupations are pushed to urban peripheries. Professionalization of the workforce is accompanied by reduced levels of segregation by income, and two ongoing megatrends in urban change: gentrification of inner-city neighbourhoods and suburbanization of poverty, with larger changes in the social geography than in levels of segregation.

Using sibling data to explore the impact of neighbourhood histories and childhood family context on income from work.

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.