Childhood Neighborhoods and Lifetime Fertility in Twentieth-Century Sweden: A K-Nearest Neighbor Approach

In addition to the individual and family context, neighborhoods and communities are important for the individual life course and family transitions. We study how social neighborhoods in childhood influence fertility outcomes in adulthood. Theories focusing on motivation, aspirations and attitudes or peer influence generally predict that low-SES children living in high-SES neighborhoods benefit from social contact, whereas resource competition and relative deprivation theories give opposite predictions. We model neighborhoods using a k-nearest neighbor approach that solves methodological problems with spatial aggregation. We study individuals growing up in Landskrona in southern Sweden, 1939-1967, and follow them through adulthood regardless of where they reside in Sweden for the period 1968-2015. We measure early childbearing and children ever born. Our findings show that women growing up in a white-collar neighborhood are less likely to have a first child before age 20, but do not have a higher life-time fertility.