The Echo of Neighborhood Disadvantage: Multigenerational Exposure to Community Hardship in Childhood and Economic Well-Being in Adulthood
Steven Alvarado1, Alexandra Cooperstock2
1University of Notre Dame, 2Cornell University

Neighborhoods are a fundamental contributor to the maintenance of inequality across generations. Using 35 years of restricted geo-coded National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data, we estimate the association between multigenerational exposure to neighborhood disadvantage in childhood and logged income earnings in adulthood. Invoking cousin fixed effects models, we find that families where both mothers and their children are exposed to adverse neighborhoods in childhood are likely to pass on the legacy of disadvantage in terms of economic outcomes to successive generations. In addition, we find heterogeneity by race and ethnicity. While there is a statistically significant negative association between multigenerational neighborhood disadvantage and income for White and Latino respondents, this is not the case for their Black counterparts. This suggests that the unabating barriers to economic success salient for Black Americans in the labor market may be disrupting a main pathway to social and economic mobility through neighborhood attainment.