Exposure to Neighborhood Income Inequality in Childhood and Later-Life Mortality, Sweden 1939-2015

• The degree of inequality in a society may be harmful to individual health, regardless of wheresomeone is located in the income ladder. An underlying assumption in the literature is thatthere is an instant link between income inequality and individual health and most studiesconsider a contemporary correlation, assessing inequality and health just about the same pointin time. Moreover, research is limited regarding the long-term consequences of exposure toincome inequality and inequality is often measured at coarse geographical levels, althoughpotential mechanisms mediate a relationship may be very local. We use geocoded longitudinalmicrodata for the city of Landskrona, 1947-1967, linked to Swedish national registers, 1968-2015, to analyze how exposure to economic inequality in childhood neighborhoods influencemortality in adulthood. For the period 1947-1967, the whole population of Landskrona isgeocoded at the address-level, and we observe their full residential histories within the city.Here, we measure continuous individual neighborhood conditions, using on the k-nearestneighbors approach, for the children (ages 1-17) in the town. We focus on the Gini-index, andaverage income in the childhood neighborhood. We follow up exposed children nationwide atage 40 (1968-2015) and use Cox proportional hazards models to analyze the effect ofneighborhood income and Gini-index on adult mortality from age 40 to 69. We control forchildhood family income, socio-spatial neighborhood characteristics, and social class inadulthood.The preliminary results indicate that economic inequalities within the childhoodneighborhoods were important for adult mortality of men, but not for women. Men who grewup in neighborhoods with low inequality experienced a relatively lower mortality risk inadulthood compared to men growing up in high inequality neighborhoods, even whenadjusting for both childhood family income, neighborhood income, and adult class. The maincontribution of this study is the analysis of exposure to neighborhood inequality in childhood,at the micro-level, and the implications over the life-course.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv -- Ekonomisk historia (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business -- Economic History (hsv//eng)

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