The literature on neighborhood effects frequently is evaluated or interpreted in relation to the question, "Do neighborhoods matter?" We argue that this question has had a disproportionate influence on the field and does not align with the complexity of theoretical models of neighborhood effects or empirical findings that have arisen from the literature. In this article, we focus on empirical work that considers how different dimensions of individuals' residential contexts become salient in their lives, how contexts influence individuals' lives over different timeframes, how individuals are affected by social processes operating at different scales, and how residential contexts influence the lives of individuals in heterogeneous ways. In other words, we review research that examines where, when, why, and for whom do residential contexts matter. Using the large literature on neighborhoods and educational and cognitive outcomes as an example, the research we review suggests that any attempt to reduce the literature to a single answer about whether neighborhoods matter is misguided. We call for a more flexible study of context effects in which theory, measurement, and methods are more closely aligned with the specific mechanisms and social processes under study.The Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application aims to inform statisticians and quantitative methodologists, as well as all scientists and users of statistics about major methodological advances and the computational tools that allow for their implementation. It will include developments in the field of statistics, including theoretical statistical underpinnings of new methodology, as well as developments in specific application domains such as biostatistics and bioinformatics, economics, machine learning, psychology, sociology, and aspects of the physical sciences.Complimentary online access to the first volume will be available until January 2015. table of contents:

This contribution is part of the special series of Inaugural Articles by members of the National Academy of Sciences elected on May 3, 2005.Disparities in verbal ability, a major predictor of later life outcomes, have generated widespread debate, but few studies have been able to isolate neighborhood-level causes in a developmentally and ecologically appropriate way. This study presents longitudinal evidence from a large-scale study of >2,000 children ages 6 -12 living in Chicago, along with their caretakers, who were followed wherever they moved in the U.S. for up to 7 years. AfricanAmerican children are exposed in such disproportionate numbers to concentrated disadvantage that white and Latino children cannot be reliably compared, calling into question traditional research strategies assuming common points of overlap in ecological risk. We therefore focus on trajectories of verbal ability among African-American children, extending recently developed counterfactual methods for time-varying causes and outcomes to adjust for a wide range of predictors of selection into and out of neighborhoods. The results indicate that living in a severely disadvantaged neighborhood reduces the later verbal ability of black children on average by Ϸ 4 points, a magnitude that rivals missing a year or more of schooling.cognitive ability ͉ neighborhood effects ͉ time-varying causal methods

This study examines how the neighborhood environments experienced over multiple generations of a family influence children’s cognitive ability. Building on recent research showing strong continuity in neighborhood environments across generations of family members, we argue for a revised perspective on “neighborhood effects” that considers the ways in which the neighborhood environment in one generation may have a lingering impact on the next generation. To specify such multigenerational effects is not simply a theoretical problem, but poses considerable methodological challenges. Instead of traditional regression techniques that may obscure multigenerational effects of neighborhood disadvantage, we utilize newly developed methods designed to generate unbiased treatment effects when treatments and confounders vary over time. The results confirm a powerful link between neighborhoods and cognitive ability that extends across generations. Being raised in a high-poverty neighborhood in one generation has a substantial negative effect on child cognitive ability in the next generation. A family’s exposure to neighborhood poverty across two consecutive generations reduces child cognitive ability by more than half a standard deviation. A formal sensitivity analysis suggests that results are robust to unobserved selection bias.

This article draws on the extensive literature on economic and social mobility in America to examine intergenerational contextual mobility, defined as the degree to which inequalities in neighborhood environments persist across generations. PSID data are analyzed to reveal remarkable continuity in neighborhood economic status from one generation to the next. The primary consequence of persistent neighborhood stratification is that the racial inequality in America's neighborhoods that existed a generation ago has been transmitted, for the most part unchanged, to the current generation. More than 70% of black children who grow up in the poorest quarter of American neighborhoods remain in the poorest quarter of neighborhoods as adults, compared to 40% of whites. The results suggest that racial inequality in neighborhood economic status is substantially underestimated with short-term measures of neighborhood income or poverty and, second, that the steps taken to end racial discrimination in the housing and lending markets have not enabled black Americans to advance out of America's poorest neighborhoods.A long and rich tradition of research in the social sciences is devoted to describing and explaining patterns of social and economic mobility in 1 I thank Robert Sampson, William Julius Wilson, and Chris Winship for their critical input on this project. I am also grateful for feedback from audiences at several universities at which I presented the paper. I received particularly detailed and valuable comments from Xavier de

In this paper, we consider neighborhood selection as a social process central to the reproduction of racial inequality in neighborhood attainment. We formulate a multilevel model that decomposes multiple sources of stability and change in longitudinal trajectories of achieved neighborhood income among nearly 4000 Chicago families followed for up to seven years wherever they moved in the United States. Even after we adjust for a comprehensive set of fixed and time-varying covariates, racial inequality in neighborhood attainment is replicated by movers and stayers alike. We also study the emergent consequences of mobility pathways for neighborhood-level structure. The temporal sorting by individuals of different racial and ethnic groups combines to yield a structural pattern offlows between neighborhoods that generates virtually nonoverlapping income distributions and little exchange between minority and white areas. Selection and racially shaped hierarchies are thus mutually constituted and account for an apparent equilibrium of neighborhood inequality.