Neighborhood Effects on Family Formation: Concentrated Poverty and Beyond
利用PSID和人口普查数据，研究邻里社会经济劣势对年轻女性婚前生育和初婚时间的影响，发现对黑人和白人女性的非线性效应，且个体社会经济地位的影响不随邻里质量变化。
We use longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, in conjunction with decennial census data, to examine the impact of neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage on young women's risk of premarital childbearing and the timing of their transition to first marriage. Discrete-time event-history models reveal that, among black women, neighborhood disadvantage has little impact on the risk of premarital childbearing, but has a significant nonlinear effect on the probability of marriage prior to first birth. Among white women, as neighborhood disadvantage increases, premarital childbearing rates rise nonlinearly, and marriage rates rise linearly. The nonlinear effects of neighborhood disadvantage on white women's premarital childbearing and black women's first prebirth marriage are generally consistent with arguments regarding the detrimental consequences of concentrated poverty, as opposed to merely high poverty. We find no evidence that the effects of individual socioeconomic status on these dimensions of family formation vary by neighborhood quality. And although white women's estimated rates of premarital childbearing may approach those of blacks in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, socioeconomic differences between the neighborhoods inhabited by black women and white women explain only a modest proportion of the pronounced racial differences in premarital child-bearing and the timing of first marriage.