The Long-Term Effects of Childhood Poverty in Adult's SES Attainment. How Important Is the Neighborhood? (Sweden, 1939-2015)

Gabriel Brea-Martinez, Centre for Economic Demography-Economic History Lund University

Childhood poverty increases the likelihood of being poor as an adult. However, we know relatively little about this transmission of poverty in the past. What spheres of exposure could be more critical, as if only poverty at family level or the neighborhood. This study both analyses determinants of childhood poverty and assesses the association between childhood poverty and economic outcomes in adulthood for men and women who grew up in southern Sweden between 1947 and 1967, and who were followed to adulthood regardless of where in Sweden they resided. Poverty is measured in relative terms in two ways: yearly exposure to familial poverty and neighborhood of various sizes (using k-neighbor and squared-meter grid’s approach). We use longitudinal, geocoded (at the address level) socioeconomic and demographic microdata for the industrial city of Landskrona (Southern Sweden), 1939-1967, linked to national registers, 1968-2015. Analytically, the paper interacts with the importance of geographic distance and time length to age-specific exposure to poverty through different childhood stages. In this regard, the paper first assesses which childhood poverty exposure and intensity could be more detrimental for children’s adult socioeconomic performance. Second, the paper also establishes a quasi-experimental approach using sibling’s fixed effect to establish if moving to a better-off neighborhood or newly built social housing could enhance children’s future outcomes. The paper brings substantial evidence on the familial and spatial transmission of poverty worked in the past and whether it changed as modern welfare societies developed

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 Presented in Session 177. Geographies of Segregation and Inequality II