Neighbourhoods and schools are two contexts in which youth spend vast amounts of their time-making friends, forming opinions and attitudes, and learning the social and academic skills that help them navigate through life. In the neighbourhood effects literature, schools are theorised to be a pathway or mechanism of the neighbourhood's influence on children and youth. We tested this hypothesis using a longitudinal dataset of 9897 secondary school students. We estimated school and neighbourhood effects separately, and then considered youths' simultaneous membership in both contexts. In the latter analysis, the associations between neighbourhood characteristics and achievement were reduced to non-significance, while the associations with the school context remained strong and significant. These results point to schools as a pathway through which the influence of the neighbourhood may be transmitted, and underscore the need for better conceptualisations of the mutiple and interrelated contexts that youth inhabit.influence on children and youth. As neighbourhood population tends to inform local school populations, schools are places where young people get into contact with neighbourhood peers and their parents. Previous studies have also documented relationships between neighbourhood characteristics and the geography of education provision, parental school choices, and the internal processes

IntroductionHow people are shaped by the environments they live in has been an important and recurrent question in the social sciences (Park and Burgess, 1924;Shaw and McKay, 1942; Wilson, 1987). Researchers from a range of disciplines have investigated whether individuals' social, cognitive, health, and behavioural outcomes are influenced by the places they live. Children and adolescents have been the focus of much of this research, with educational outcomes being one of the key areas of interest (Ainsworth, 2002;Leventhal and Brooks-Gunn, 2000;Oliver et al, 2007). Neighbourhoods are thought to be particularly relevant for young people, as many spend a vast amount of their time thereöresiding, socialising with friends, participating in local activities, and often attending local schools and day care centres. These children and youth will thus have numerous daily interactions with local peers, adults, and services; their behaviour, attitudes, and opportunities will be in part shaped in this setting (Bronfenbrenner, 1989;Brooks-Gunn et al, 1997).The present study adds to the fields of neighbourhood and educational research by examining the existence and nature of neighbourhood effects on youth educational achievement in the Netherlands. In this paper we aim to assess the potential for the neighbourhood context to affect educational achievement in the Netherlands; to test whether certain neighbourhood conditions are associated with individual achievement; and to examine whether these associations vary across student socioeconomic status (SES), gender, or nativity.

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Historically, studies of condition-dependent signals in animals have been male-centric, but recent work suggests that female ornaments can also communicate individual quality (e.g., disease state, fecundity). There also has been a surge of interest in how urbanization alters signaling traits, but we know little about if and how cities affect signal expression in female animals. We measured carotenoid-based plumage coloration and coccidian (Isospora spp.) parasite burden in desert and city populations of house finches Haemorhous mexicanus to examine links between urbanization, health state, and feather pigmentation in males and females. In earlier work, we showed that male house finches are less colorful and more parasitized in the city, and we again detected such patterns in this study for males; however, urban females were less colorful, but not more parasitized, than rural females. Moreover, contrary to rural populations, we found that urban birds (regardless of sex) with larger patches of carotenoid coloration were also more heavily infected with coccidia. These results show that urban environments can disrupt condition-dependent color expression and highlight the need for more studies on how cities affect disease and signaling traits in both male and female animals.

In a country with open school choice and equal funding of schools, does where you live matter for your educational outcomes? This paper addresses this question using recent data from a study of secondary school students in the Netherlands. Drawing on the international literature, the paper first outlines how the neighbourhood context may be relevant for young peoples' educational opportunities and outcomes, paying special attention to the role that the school may play in the observed relationship between neighbourhood characteristics and educational outcomes. The analysis examines whether there are any educational benefits of living in a neighbourhood with a high socio‐economic status, over and above individual background characteristics, and if so, whether these benefits can be attributed to the characteristics of the schools that youth attend. The findings are summarised and discussed with reference to the wider literature. Based on the findings, suggestions for future research at the intersection of young people, the neighbourhood and school are developed.