Peer effects on residential mobility

In this paper, led by Laura Fürsich, we examine how former secondary school classmates influence the residential mobility behavior of young adults. Using Swedish population registers, we identify a set of people who attended ninth or twelfth grade in Sweden. We connect these people to their ninth and twelfth grade classmates and trace their residential locations up to and through adulthood. Using discrete choice methods, we assess how proximity to peers (i.e., former classmates) influences where people move within the metro areas where they live. We also assess how these proximity effects change over the life course. We find that proximity to peers matters—people are more likely to move to neighborhoods near to peers—but that these effects wane when people attend university and when they enter into cohabiting unions. Our findings suggest that schools can act as engines of residential stratification through their effects on networks, as schools are frequently segregated along ethnic and class lines and draw on limited geographic catchments. Link: https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcaf002