Center for Demography and Ecology University of Wisconsin-Madison The Legacy of Disadvantage: Multigenerational Neighborhood Effects on Cognitive Ability

This study examines how the neighborhood environments experienced over multiple generations of a family influence children’s cognitive ability. Building on recent research showing strong continuity in neighborhood environments across generations of family members, we argue for a revised perspective on “neighborhood effects” that considers the ways in which the neighborhood environment in one generation may have a lingering impact on the next generation. To specify such multigenerational effects is not simply a theoretical problem, but poses considerable methodological challenges. Instead of traditional regression techniques that may obscure multigenerational effects of neighborhood disadvantage, we utilize newly developed methods designed to generate unbiased treatment effects when treatments and confounders vary over time. The results confirm a powerful link between neighborhoods and cognitive ability that extends across generations. Being raised in a high-poverty neighborhood in one generation has a substantial negative effect on child cognitive ability in the next generation. A family’s exposure to neighborhood poverty across two consecutive generations reduces child cognitive ability by more than half a standard deviation. A formal sensitivity analysis suggests that results are robust to unobserved selection bias. THE LEGACY OF DISADVANTAGE: MULTIGENERATIONAL NEIGHBORHOOD EFFECTS ON COGNITIVE ABILITY Research on the relationship between neighborhoods and child development has frequently overlooked a crucial dimension of neighborhood stratification: that of time. Whereas much research on neighborhood effects implicitly treats the neighborhood environment as a static feature of a child’s life and assumes that the neighborhood has instantaneous effects on children, a life course perspective on neighborhood inequality shifts attention toward continuity and change in the neighborhood environment over time and across generations, and considers the role that neighborhoods play in altering or structuring individuals’ or families’ trajectories. The significance of this shift in perspective is supported in recent research demonstrating the complex relationships between exposure to disadvantaged neighborhood environments and child developmental outcomes, which suggests that the neighborhood may be most salient early in adolescence, and that the influence of the neighborhood environment may be lagged or cumulative (Wheaton and Clarke 2003). Most notably, a recent study of adolescent cognitive ability among youth in Chicago neighborhoods demonstrates that if children are raised in extremely disadvantaged neighborhood environments, the influence of their exposure to neighborhood disadvantage lingers even if they move on to a more diverse neighborhood (Sampson, Sharkey, and Raudenbush 2008). But what if the child’s caregivers were also raised in similarly disadvantaged environments? Is it possible that a parent’s childhood neighborhood environment could have an influence that extends to the next generation? In this study we add to the recent line of research 1 A group of studies focuses on neighborhoods over the life course, including Quillian (2003); Briggs and Keys (2009), which examine spells of exposure to poor and non-poor neighborhoods over time; Kunz, Page, and Solon (2003); and Jackson and Mare (2007), which examine the implications of measuring children’s neighborhood characteristics over multiple years for neighborhood effects estimates. A parallel literature has examined similar questions with regard to family income, including Duncan and Brooks-Gunn (1997), Wagmiller et al. (2006), and Wolfe et al. (1996).