Decomposing Residential Self-Selection via a Life-Course Perspective

We propose a decomposition of residential self-selection by understanding the process of its formation. We take a life-course perspective and postulate that locations experienced early in life can have a lasting effect on our locational preferences later in life. In other words, what was experienced spatially is a key factor contributing to our residential self-selection, and our preferences in residential locations are formed long before the onset of our self-selection. We further hypothesize that this prior-location influence is modified by the duration and recency of the prior stay. Using a dataset collected in the New York City Area, we estimated a series of multinomial logit models to test these hypotheses. The results confirm the prior-location influence and demonstrate that this precedes residential self-selection and is impacted by its own properties such as duration and recency. Furthermore, the analysis separating child-bearing households from non-child-bearing households shows an interaction between prior-location influence and the presence of children.