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

Abstract

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.

A Multilevel Analysis of Factors Associated with Stunting Among Children Under Five Years in Lesotho: A Study of The Lesotho Multiple Cluster Indicator Study Of 2018

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Ethically informed urban planning: measuring distributive spatial justice for neighbourhood accessibility

“…Neighbourhoods are considered "important building blocks in cities" (Patias et al, 2021) where multiple levels of social ecology converge, including "poverty, affluence, employment, family structure, violence, and criminalisation" (Sampson, 2019:8). Recent academic research has shown that neighbourhoods matter for social mobility and can shape long-term individual economic outcomes (Chetty and Hendren, 2018;Modai-Snir and van Ham, 2018;Troost et al, 2023). Over the last thirty years, there has been a global trend of state investment focusing on the individual household as the primary means of social mobility (Parnell et al, 2009) instead of investing in local neighbourhood infrastructure.…”

“…Based on each ethical principle, these metrics re-imagine ideal distributions of accessibility (Equality Reach Centrality, Rawls' Reach Centrality and Utilitarian Reach Centrality) and the gap (Equality Reach Gap, Rawls' Reach Gap and Utilitarian Reach Gap) between existing and ideal neighbourhood accessibility levels (see Fig 1C and Section 5 for details). Developing spatial justice metrics for neighbourhood accessibility enables the results to be crucially linked to multi-dimensional characteristics of neighbourhoods (Troost et al, 2023;Nelson et al, 2024).…”

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