Poor Places, Poor Prospects? Counterfactual Models of Neighbourhood Effects on Social Exclusion in Stockholm, Sweden

Abstract

This study utilises Swedish longitudinal data from the 'golden era' of Swedish welfare policy to evaluate the impact of neighbourhood poverty during adolescence on a wide range of social exclusion outcomes (including but not limited to educational and employment status) within a counterfactual approach based on matched sampling. With certain caveats regarding inter alia the lack of dynamism in the counterfactual methodology, the empirical analyses show that, when two groups of children who are identical according to observed factors before age 10 (including household income, family structure and welfare receipt) live in different types of neighbourhood in adolescence, the outcome for those who grow up in a poor neighbourhood is not more likely to be worse than for those who grow up in a more affluent neighbourhood.