Contextual Effects on Educational Attainment in Individualized Neighborhoods; Differences across Gender and Social Class

This paper analyzes if a multi-scale representation of geographical context based on statistical aggregates computed for individualized neighborhoods can lead to improved estimates of neighborhood effect. Our study group consists of individuals born in 1980 that have lived in Sweden since 1995 and we analyze the effect of neighborhood context at age 15 on educational outcome at age 30 controlling for parental background. A new software, Equipop, was used to compute the socio-economic composition of neighborhoods centered on individual residential locations and ranging in scale from including the nearest 12 to the nearest 25,600 neighbors. Our results indicate that context measures based on fixed geographical sub-divisions can lead to an underestimation of neighborhood effects. A multi-scalar representation of geographical context also makes it easier to estimate how neighborhood effects vary across different demographic groups. This indicates that scale-sensitive measures of geographical context could help to re-invigorate the neighborhood effects literature.