How Inherited Residential Environments Shape Socioeconomic Outcomes: Evidence from Immigrant and Native Families over Three Generations

Louise Caron , Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)
Mathieu Ichou, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)
Haley McAvay, University of York
Rosa Weber, Stockholm University

A large body of literature has established that living in deprived areas during childhood negatively impacts outcomes in adulthood. While most studies adopt a single-generation perspective, only a long-term and multigenerational approach allows to understand the scope of neighbourhood effects since residential characteristics are transmitted to the next generation. This article adds to the rare studies that explore the relationship between residential context and socioeconomic outcomes over three generations. We examine how the combined effects of parents’ and grandparents’ residential environments shape children’s SES outcomes. Our contribution is to investigate whether multigenerational residential effects are more or less salient for children of immigrants compared to natives, and to explore the joint effects of neighbourhood SES and ethnoracial composition, in the novel context of France. We link data from a recent French survey, Trajectoires et Origines 2 (2019-2020), with historical censuses to construct variables of grandparents’ and parents’ residential environments in terms of ethnoracial composition and socioeconomic disadvantage. We use logistic regressions to compare the multigenerational effects of these indicators on socioeconomic outcomes (holding no degree, a university degree, an executive occupation, or being unemployed), and test interactions to explore how they differ within immigrant and native families. We expect to find a negative effect of residential disadvantage on children’s SES outcomes, which will be the strongest when parents and grandparents lived in deprived settings. However, we anticipate that multigenerational exposure to areas with ethnoracial diversity may have a buffering effect, as coethnic proximity might favour the integration of immigrant-origin children.

See extended abstract

 Presented in Session P3. Migration, Economics, Policies, History