Unraveling Neighborhood Effects: Evidence from Two European Welfare States

In the last decades social mixing programs have become a key ingredient of urban policy throughout Europe. There are important political motives for paying attention to ‘the neighborhood’: neighborhoods of poverty in cities in Western Europe and North America have been the stage of riots and unrest for more than three decades now and recent examples in Leeds/Bradford and the French urban banlieues are fresh in many people’s memories. Consequently, many politicians in France, the Netherlands, Germany, and the UK have become convinced that rigorous transformations of the so-called ‘problematic neighborhoods’ is unavoidable. The aim of the resulting area-based programs