title: Intergenerational transmission of neighbourhood poverty: an analysis of neighbourhood histories of individuals.
abstract: The extent to which socioeconomic (dis)advantage is transmitted between generations is receiving increasing attention from academics and policymakers. However, few studies have investigated whether there is a spatial dimension to this intergenerational transmission of (dis)advantage. Drawing on the concept of neighbourhood biographies, this study contends that there are links between the places individuals live with their parents and their subsequent neighbourhood experiences as independent adults. Using individual-level register data tracking the whole Stockholm population from 1990 to 2008, and bespoke neighbourhoods, this study is the first to use sequencing techniques to construct individual neighbourhood histories. Through visualisation methods and ordered logit models, we demonstrate that the socioeconomic composition of the neighbourhood children lived in before they left the parental home is strongly related to the status of the neighbourhood they live in 5, 12 and 18 years later. Children living with their parents in high poverty concentration neighbourhoods are very likely to end up in similar neighbourhoods much later in life. The parental neighbourhood is also important in predicting the cumulative exposure to poverty concentration neighbourhoods over a long period of early adulthood. Ethnic minorities were found to have the longest cumulative exposure to poverty concentration neighbourhoods. These findings imply that for some groups, disadvantage is both inherited and highly persistent.
authors.affiliation: OTB - Research for the Built Environment, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology Delft, The Netherlands Email: m.vanham@tudelft.nl ; University of St Andrews UK ; IZA Bonn Germany.
authors.forename: Maarten
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: van Ham
authors.affiliation: Institute for Housing and Urban Research, Uppsala University Uppsala, Sweden.
authors.forename: Lina
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Hedman
authors.affiliation: School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol Bristol, BS8 1SS.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Manley
authors.affiliation: Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge Cambridge, CB2 3RQ.
authors.forename: Rory
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Coulter
authors.affiliation: Department of Social and Economic Geography, Uppsala University Uppsala, Sweden ; Department of Human Geography, Stockholm University Stockholm, Sweden.
authors.forename: John
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Östh
keywords: Sweden; deprived neighbourhoods; intergenerational transmission; neighbourhood biography; sequence analysis