The impacts of neighborhood earnings and wealth profiles on families’ residential selections

Increasing residential segregation of affluent families is widespread internationally, raising concerns about “opportunity hoarding” and the perpetuation of social inequalities. Yet, we do not know whether this phenomenon is driven by families selecting neighborhoods characterized by their profiles of earnings or wealth. We model neighborhood selection during the 1993–2017 period by native Norwegian parents of children born 1992–2003, using a conditional logit analysis. We employ population register data from the Oslo metropolitan area that allows the calculation of neighborhood wealth profiles. We find that neighborhood residents’ real capital and financial capital distributions are empirically distinct from their earnings distribution and strongly predict residential selections, but with considerable heterogeneity depending on wealth of the moving family and child’s gender. Economic homophily dominates the neighborhood selections of wealthy families; others appear driven by avoiding status discrepancy. Neighborhood economic profiles are stronger predictors when moving with girls.