Do Affluent Families Move Wisely? An Econometric Analysis of Neighborhood Selection and Educational Effects in Oslo

Source abstract

It is commonly believed that affluent parents seek to advantage their children by segregating residentially, thereby perpetuating intergenerational social inequalities. We test whether affluent parents are attracted to neighborhoods with population characteristics that benefit their children’s education. Using 1993-2017 register data on affluent, native Norwegian families from the Oslo metropolitan area, we estimate both neighborhood selection and neighborhood effect models, then compare their results. We find that the affluent only occasionally “move wisely.” When moving with girls, they are drawn to neighborhoods with smaller shares of low-earning families, which indeed subsequently proves correlated with girls’ better grade performance. When moving with boys, they are attracted to neighborhoods with higher shares of financially wealthy and university-educated families, which are positively correlated with boys’ grades. Regardless of child gender, the affluent tend to avoid places with more non-Western immigrants, where grade outcomes are indeed less desirable. However, in the vast majority of the comparisons tested, affluent families fail to select neighborhood population attributes consistent with how they are statistically related to their children’s grades. We conclude that processes and consequences of affluent segregation—what is often termed “opportunity hoarding”—are more nuanced and less-hegemonic than typically perceived.