The project addresses how the spatial context in which people live during different stages of their lives shape their life prospects and socioeconomic outcomes.
The opportunity to move up the socioeconomic ladder, during one’s lifetime and in relation to one’s parents, has been recognized as a key matter for combating poverty and reducing inequality.
This is the premise for the project, to which we add an increasingly relevant dimension by asking: How does the spatial context in which people live during different stages of their lives, shape their life prospects and socioeconomic outcomes?
Over time, the determinants of an individual’s socioeconomic position have evolved from a focus on individual choice, to the family as the main avenue for social reproduction through the transmission of parental endowments and parental investments in their offspring.
More recently, socioeconomic mobility has evolved, as a process that plays out in multiple spheres. The geographical context has been expanded to include larger geographical areas than neighborhoods. The project is justified by a further need for knowledge on what both neighborhood and larger geographical contexts means for opportunities to move up the socioeconomic ladder.
We ask: Is geographical mobility a prerequisite for socioeconomic mobility? What are the potential links between family wealth acquired in regions of different size and centrality, and individual life chances? How does where you grew up as a child matter for labor-market attainment? How do different dimensions of childhood residential and neighborhood context affect adult outcomes?
Research findings
These questions and the subsequent publications can be divided into two broad categories: Variation across larger regions, and variation across neighborhoods.
Variation across larger regions
Galster & Osland (2024) study the wage advantage of living in a city ("the urban wage premium"), and show that women with education receive the greatest payoff; women with low education gain the least, while men gain benefits in the middle of the scale. They conclude that urbanization in Norway has led to a larger income gap between city and countryside, especially for high-educated women.
Wessel & Magnusson Turner (2021), looks at how rural-urban migration affects the movers' long-term income. Their key finding is that women benefit significantly more than men if the relocation takes place during the education phase, but not if they move at a later stage. Women also earn more by moving to Oslo, while men earn more by moving to Bergen, Trondheim or Stavanger.
A follow-up article, by Magnusson Turner & Wessel (2024), looks at economic mobility and characteristics of the childhood region. Their most important finding is that daughters who grow up in regions with a varied labor market have higher upward mobility than sons with similar experiences.
Galster & Wessel (2024a) find that settlement at the top of the hierarchy is strongly correlated with changes in net wealth, housing wealth and financial wealth. The differences in net wealth growth between the examined levels are most dramatic for high-educated, younger people.
Galster & Wessel (2024b) tries to explain the latter patterns by exploring the connection between homeownership and changes in wealth. Their conclusion is that ownership is greatly important for wealth accumulation. Living over time in an urbanized area has a boosting effect on net, but only for homeowners. Tenants do not achieve any increase in wealth by living in such areas.
Variation across neighborhoods
Wessel (2022) studies the impact of economic change, with growth in finance and business services, on economic inequality and segregation in Oslo, Bergen and Trondheim. He finds the same patterns in all three cities, with effects that partly go through the labor market and partly through the property market.
Three other articles look at connections between parents' choices in the housing market and children's educational achievements. Galster, Magnusson Turner & Santiago (2021, 2022) and Santiago, Galster & Magnusson Turner (2024) find a general tendency for families to settle in neighborhoods where the neighbours have similar characteristics to themselves, e.g., in terms of income and/or minority/majority background.
They conclude that location and the composition of population groups in different places influence the families' housing choices: high-income Norwegian and Western families tend to avoid neighborhoods in central and eastern parts of Oslo.
They also find that the level of income, the proportion with higher education and the proportion with a non-Western background in the neighborhood affect young adults' educational achievements, although with variation across gender and immigrant background.
A more specific indication is that housing applicants consider the symbolic value of "East" and "West", which, in the long term, has ripple effects on life opportunities among children and young adults.
Participants at OsloMet
Partner institutions
- University of Oslo
- Wayne State University
- Michigan State University
Publications
Galster, G.C., & Osland, L. (2024). Educational and gender heterogeneity of the rural-urban earnings premium: New evidence from Norway. Regional Science and Urban Economics, 105
Galster, G., & Wessel, T. (2024). Homeowner-renter wealth inequalities and position in the rural-urban hierarchy. Housing Studies, 1-25
Galster, G., & Wessel, T. (2024). Urban residence as a driver of wealth differentials: New evidence from Norway. Population, Space and Place, e2753.
Santiago, A.M., Galster, G.C., & Magnusson Turner, L. (2024). Heterogeneous neighbourhood effects on the educational attainments of native Norwegian and immigrant-descendant female and male young adults. Urban Studies
Wessel, T. (2022). Business Services, Income Inequality, and Income Segregation in Metropolitan Areas: Direct and Indirect Links. Economic Geography, 1-23 (tandfonline.com)
Galster, G.C., Turner, L.M., & Santiago, A.M. (2021). Neighbourhood selection by natives and immigrants: Homophily or limited spatial search? Housing Studies, 1-27 (tandfonline.com)
Wessel, T. & Turner, L.M. (2020). The migration pathway to economic mobility: Does gender matter? Population, Space and Place (onlinelibrary.wiley.com)
