This paper contributes to the literature on obtaining unbiased estimates of neighborhood effects, explored in the context of a centralized social welfare state. We employ a longitudinal database comprised of all working age adults in metropolitan Sweden 1991-1999 to investigate the degree to which neighborhood income mix relates to subsequent labor incomes of adults and how this relationship varies by gender and employment status. We control for unobserved, time-invariant individual characteristics by estimating a first-difference equation of changes in average incomes between the 1991-1995 and 1996-1999 periods. We further control for unobserved time varying characteristics through an analysis of non-movers. These methods substantially reduce the magnitude of the apparent effect of neighborhood shares of low-, middle-and high-income males. Nevertheless, statistically and substantively significant neighborhood effects persist, though relationships are nonlinear and vary by gender and employment status. Males who are not fully employed appear most sensitive to neighborhood economic mix in all contexts.

Research and policy contextThe issue of immigration and the resulting ethnic concentrations in some metropolitan neighbourhoods has achieved a salient position in public discourse and policy discussions in Western Europe and the United States alike. In the United States this issue has taken on increased political significance as states and the federal government have considered and sometimes enacted legislative initiatives that would restrict immigration or limit types of social benefits to immigrants already living in the country (Preston et al, 1998). The popular justification for these initiatives is that many immigrants`don't pull their own weight' and thus create`fiscal burdens' (James et al, 1998). In Western Europe this issue is implicit in the widespread adoption of`social mix' strategies wherein new housing development programmes and allocation schemes for social housing tenants have been tailored to minimize ethnic clustering (Andersson, 1998;2001;Musterd, 2003;Musterd and Andersson, 2005). In some countriesönot least in Sweden, which provides the empirical ground for this paper, but also in the Netherlands, Norway, and Denmarkö refugee-dispersal policies are triggered by implicit and sometimes explicit views that the spatial concentration of immigrants is detrimental for their integration processes (Andersson, 2004).

We analyse the determinants of social assistance receipt among young adults in three Nordic countries, focusing on social-background and life-course events during early adulthood. We ask whether they are Article 274 Journal of European Social Policy 24(3)related differently to short-term and long-term receipt. Short-term poverty could be more individualized than long-term poverty which can be expected to be more strongly related to social background. We applied generalized ordinal logit modelling to longitudinal register-based data. Both social-background and life-course factors were found to be important, but our results did not confirm the hypothesis of social background predicting mostly long-term receipt and life-course factors predicting mostly short-term receipt. Leaving the parental home early and parental social assistance receipt were important determinants of social assistance receipt, and both factors predicted longer duration of receipt as well. We found some differences between the countries, which may be related to differences in youth unemployment and social welfare systems.

There is substantial interest among policy makers in both Western Europe and North America in reducing concentrations of disadvantaged households through initiatives to enhance the 'social mix' of neighbourhoods. However, there is little consideration or understanding with regard to which mix of household characteristics matters most in influencing the socio-economic outcomes for individual residents. This paper explores the degree to which a wide variety of 1995 neighbourhood conditions in Sweden are statistically related to earnings for all adult metropolitan and non-metropolitan men and women during the 1996-99 period, controlling for a wide variety of personal characteristics. The paper finds that the extremes of the neighbourhood income distribution, operationalized by the percentages of adult males with earnings in the lowest 30th and the highest 30th percentiles, hold greater explanatory power than domains of household mix related to education, ethnicity or housing tenure. Separating the effects of having substantial shares of low and high income neighbours, it is found that it is the presence of the former that means most for the incomes of metropolitan and non-metropolitan men and women, with the largest effects for metropolitan men. Research and Policy ContextScholarly interest in the degree to which neighbourhood conditions affect the life chances of children, youth and adults has skyrocketed over the last 15 years, as evidenced by the upsurge of research papers, special issues of scholarly journals and reviews of the literature. 1 Although there seems to be an emerging consensus in the US that

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