Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/110099 
Year of Publication: 
2015
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 8882
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
There is increasing evidence that our societies are polarizing. Most studies focus on labour market and educational outcomes and show a socioeconomic polarization of the bottom and top ends of the population distribution. Processes of social polarization have a spatial dimension which should be visible in the changing mosaic of neighbourhoods in cities. Many studies treat neighbourhoods as more or less static entities, but urban researchers are now increasingly interested in neighbourhood trajectories, moving away from point-in-time measures and enabling a close examination of processes of change. Sequence analysis allows for a visualization of complete trajectories, and is therefore gaining popularity in the social sciences. However, sequence analysis is mainly a descriptive method and statisticians have argued for the use of a tree-structured discrepancy analysis to examine to what extent outcome variability can be explained by a set of predictors. This paper offers a first empirical application of sequence analysis combined with a tree-structured discrepancy analysis. This paper contributes to the debate on urban renewal programs by offering a unique viewpoint on longitudinal neighbourhood change. Our findings show a clear pattern of socio-spatial polarization in Dutch cities, raising questions about the effects of area-based policies and the importance of path-dependency.
Subjects: 
neighbourhood change
socio-spatial polarization
urban renewal
sequence analysis
tree-structured discrepancy analysis
JEL: 
O18
P25
R23
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size
1.61 MB





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.