Childhood Neighborhoods and Life-Time Fertility in Twentieth-Century Southern Sweden: A k-Nearest Neighbor Approach

Summary, in English

Despite a large literature on the importance of childhood neighborhoods for life course transitions, there is a lack of fertility studies combining a life-course perspective with detailed neighborhood measures. Addressing this gap, we use longitudinal data in which the entire population of a Swedish town is geocoded at the address-level, 1939–1967, and linked to national registers from 1968 to 2015. We study how social neighborhoods in childhood influence fertility outcomes by constructing individual neighborhoods at the address level to measure the social class of nearby childhood neighbors. We analyze the age at first and last birth, children ever born, birth spacing, and childlessness. Growing up in upper-class neighborhoods is associated with delayed fertility for both men and women, but no association is found for the number of children ever born or for childlessness. Associations are stable over time, and later ages of neighborhood exposure matter more, especially for men. Contrary to prior literature’s focus on the lower classes, our results are driven by upper-class individuals growing up in distinctly white-collar neighborhoods.

• Author: Vinicius Souza-Maia; Finn Hedefalk; Martin Dribe
• Department/s: Centre for Economic Demography; Department of Economic History
• Publishing year: 2024-04-03
• Language: English
• Publication/Series: Population, Space and Place
• Links: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/psp.2785
• Document type: Journal article
• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Inc.
• Topic: Other Social Sciences not elsewhere specified
• Keywords: fertility; neighborhood effects; life course; childhood neighborhood; K-nearest neighbors
• Status: Inpress
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISSN: 1544-8444