Socioeconomic Segregation – The Impact of Neighborhoods, Schools and Policy Across the Life Course

Socioeconomic segregation and the characteristics of neighborhoods are potentially important for choices and constraints regarding life-course outcomes, such as education, career, and residence.

However, despite a large literature on segregation, the knowledge about the causes and consequences of socioeconomic segregation is still limited.

Our aim is to build a research environment to study how socioeconomic segregation shapes individual life chances across the life course, and examine effective strategies to counteract the negative impact of segregation.

We study (1) how the socioeconomic characteristics of schools and neighborhoods influence economic outcomes throughout the life course, (2) how residential segregation persists across generations, and (3) the efficacy of interventions and policies to counteract the negative effects of segregation.

The environment is based on a collaboration between economics, demography, geography, and economic history leveraging a uniquely rich data infrastructure, with both economic, geographical and historical depth.

We use state-of-the-art methodologies to measure neighborhoods dynamically and to assess the causal impact of segregation and educational policy on economic outcomes. We collaborate with external stakeholders in evaluating policy to break segregation.

Our research is characterized by an explicit life-course perspective, where individuals are followed from childhood to adulthood, using longitudinal individual-level data.