published in: Journal of the European Economic Association, 2017, 15 (4), 746-783
Theories about neighbours' influence on children based on social capital, cohesion and disorganisation stress the importance of neighbourhood stability. However, amongst the vast number of studies on the effect of neighbours on a child's education, none has tested whether neighbourhood stability matters. We fill this gap by estimating the causal effect of residential turnover on student test score gains.
We show that high neighbourhood turnover reduces value added for students who stay in their neighbourhood, and this effect is more pronounced in more deprived neighbourhoods. Estimation is based on administrative data on four cohorts of secondary school children in England, allowing us to control for unobserved confounding individual effects, neighbourhood fixed effects and trends, plus school-by-cohort shocks. These main results, coupled with auxiliary findings based on survey data, suggest that neighbourhood turnover damages education through the disruption of local ties and social capital, highlighting a so-far undiscovered externality of mobility.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.