Context disadvantage and residential mobility from early life into adulthood: impacts on socio-economic outcomes
2026-09-01
Individuals’ socio-economic trajectories are shaped by both persistence and change in their residential environments, making it essential to examine how the socio-spatial dynamics of context disadvantage and residential mobility interact over the life course. While prior research has often studied these factors separately and within specific life stages, less is known about their compound effects and their interrelatedness across childhood and adulthood. This study addresses this gap by investigating how exposure to residential contexts and residential mobility from birth influences socio-economic outcomes in early adulthood. Using Swedish longitudinal register data, we analyze residential trajectories and their association with economic and occupational (dis) advantage among individuals born between 1990 and 1993. Our findings show that mobility magnifies the associations between context exposure and socio-economic outcomes. Prolonged exposure to disadvantaged areas is most harmful when it coincides with moving, consistent with a compound penalty of instability and resource-poor environments. Second, moves in childhood are generally detrimental, while adult moves are opportunity-enhancing unless they occur in disadvantaged contexts, where the mobility premium levels off. Third, exiting disadvantaged contexts is associated with higher attainment than remaining persistently exposed, indicating that later socio-spatial trajectories can attenuate earlier disadvantage. These findings underscore the importance of considering both residential context and mobility across the life course for understanding—and interrupting—the reproduction of socio-economic inequality.