Childhood neighbourhoods and life-time fertility in twentieth-century Southern Sweden: A k-nearest neighbour approach

Despite a large literature on the importance of childhood neighbourhoods for life course transitions, there is a lack of fertility studies combining a life-course perspective with detailed neighbourhood measures. Addressing this gap, we use longitudinal data in which the entire population of a Swedish town is geocoded at the address-level, 1939–1967, and linked to national registers from 1968 to 2015. We study how social neighbourhoods in childhood influence fertility outcomes by constructing individual neighbourhoods at the address level to measure the social class of nearby childhood neighbours. We analyse the age at first and last birth, children ever born, birth spacing and childlessness. Growing up in higher-status neighbourhoods is associated with delayed fertility for both men and women, but no association is found for the number of children ever born or for childlessness. Associations are stable over time, and later ages of neighbourhood exposure matter more, especially for men. Contrary to prior literature's focus on the lower classes, our results are driven by higher-status individuals growing up in distinctly white-collar neighbourhoods.