Externalizing Externalities: Social-Emotional Skills, Neighborhood Effects, and Intergenerational Mobility for Disadvantaged Children

Abstract

The modern-day United States suffers from low levels of intergenerational mobility, compared to both the country’s past and the rest of the developed world. Consequently, increasing the level of upward mobility in the country is one of the major challenges facing policy-makers today. As a substantial body of research over the past 30 years has demonstrated, the effect of disadvantaged neighborhoods on the adult incomes of children with low socioeconomic status contributes significantly to this disappointing level of intergenerational mobility. Other research has pointed to social-emotional skills as a key determinant of life outcomes for low socioeconomic status populations. In this Thesis, I connect these two bodies of literature by showing how social-emotional skills serve as a pathway through which neighborhoods affect the adult incomes of low socioeconomic status children. In doing so, I use newly released data on child social-emotional skills at age 15 from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study as well as data on neighborhood characteristics from Opportunity Insights. In the first part of my research, I find that a child's exposure from ages 0-9 to counties with more positive effects on intergenerational mobility is associated with fewer externalizing behavior problems at age 15 for low socioeconomic status children, but not for high and middle socioeconomic status children. This finding suggests that social-emotional skills are an important pathway for neighborhood effects on income, specifically for children from low socioeconomic status backgrounds. In the second part of my research, I examine the association between externalizing behavior and individual county characteristics. I find that for these disadvantaged children, exposure during childhood to counties with lower percentages of single mothers explains a substantial portion of the association between exposure to upwardly mobile counties and externalizing behavior at age 15. This finding implies that family structure is a significant contributing factor in the relationships between neighborhoods, social-emotional skills, and income for children from low socioeconomic status backgrounds. I also find that exposure to counties with less sprawl and exposure to counties with larger immigrant populations are associated with fewer externalizing behaviors at age 15 for these children, although, unlike with the percent of single mothers, these associations do not explain the relationship between externalizing behavior and levels of county mobility. This research elucidates how social-emotional skills serve as a vital pathway through which neighborhoods affect the outcomes of disadvantaged children. These skills should receive greater attention in both research and policy along with more commonly emphasized pathways such as cognitive skills and health. Additionally, this research demonstrates the importance of family structure at the neighborhood level for both child development and economic outcomes later in life. Researchers and policy-makers concerned with the effect of neighborhoods on disadvantaged children should focus on the impact of single motherhood on communities as a whole, rather than just its implications for the children of single mothers.