A Study Of Neighborhood Effect From The Perspective Of Residential Segregation

Since the Reform and Opening in 1978,China has experienced high economic growth and made remarkable achievements,and is called the Chinese Miracle.In the meanwhile,the economic inequality in China is also rising.The Gini Coefficients of China have been reached to the international alert line of 0.4 in recent years.China now faces severe economic inequality problems.The Great Gatsby Curve informs us that countries with higher economic inequality also have lower social mobility.The less social mobility has been an important challenge for China's future development.And the 19~thh CPC National Congress figures out that China must remove institutional barriers that block the social mobility of labor.In the study of social mobility,American economist Raj Chetty finds that the neighborhood in the childhood will affect residents'future education,income and whether be a single parent or not.People's ability to realize up mobility varies if they encounter different neighborhood effects.The research about the neighborhood effect on social mobility has been popular.In the past forty years,Chinese residents have witnessed rapid urbanization process and their living environment changes a lot.Residential Segregation has appeared in contemporary China.Residential segregation means different neighborhood environments will affect people's socio-economic outcomes.Since the cluster of groups,the neighbors of advantaged people usually have high socio-economic status,and people there are affected by positive neighborhood effect.They will accumulate more human capital and have higher ability to realize up mobility.On the contrary,the disadvantaged people have more difficulties on human capital accumulation and a narrow rising channel.They face higher risk of being trapped in poverty.The neighborhood effect has widened the gaps between the advantaged people and the disadvantaged people.Thus,our research wants to explore the neighborhood effect caused by residential segregation on social mobility and the mechanism behind that.Based on the analysis of related literature,the arrangement of our research consists of the following components:First,we measure the degree of Chinese residential segregation using a national survey.Second,we discuss the neighborhood effect on intergenerational mobility whih is measured with student academic achievement and children's non-cognitive ability.These two chapters reflect the intergenerational consequence of residential segregation.Then,the relationship between neighborhood effect and entrepreneurship is investigated in the following chapter.We call this as the neighborhood effect on Intragenerational mobility.The main findings are concluded below:First,the national dissimilarity index calculated with CFPS is 0.5384,which is in high level.In different regions,the dissimilarity index varies a lot.This index is higher in the rural area and poor provinces,ranging from 0.3764 to 0.6078.What causes this difference is the urban area and developed provinces have a prosperous economic and open society.The local residents in there are more likely to realize up social mobility.Thus,elite are clustered here to pursue success.The distribution of people is more homogeneous in these regions.Second,using CEPS,we measure the neighborhood environment with the occupation information of neighbors provided by families.The empirical evidence shows that there is a positive neighborhood effect on student academic achievements.Elite people in the neighborhood act as role models for both student and parent,and improve their educational expectation.Students will perform well in the learning process.Besides,the positive neighborhood effect only appears in advantaged families.However,our finding shows that with the increase of public education investment,the neighborhood effect on student academic achievement will attenuate.Third,CEPS also informs us that the neighborhood has a significant positive relationship with children's non-cognitive ability which consists of the expression,reaction,learning ability and curious.Then,we conduct a serious of robust tests to enhance the validity of the results.Meanwhile,many rubost tests are applied in our research and the results ensure the consistency and credibility of our primary conclusion.In the heterogeneous analysis,parents'education and occupation alter the positive neighborhood effect on non-cognitive ability,but children's migration and hukou statue will not.Forth,the evidence from CFPS also shows that the positive neighborhood effect also works on entrepreneurship.People who live in an advantaged neighborhood are involved in a valuable social network and get market and commercial information from the networks.The information generates an opportunity for people to exhibit their entrepreneurship and operate a firm.However,people who are young,higher educated and with non-agricultural hukou benefit less from the positive neighborhood effect since their diversified information channel.What makes us surprise is that we find that Internet facility the information sharing and lower the effect of neighborhood.With the development and widespread of new information technology,the digital divide will be decreasing.