Tag Archives | School Attendance Area

Buying In: Positional Competition, Schools, Income Inequality, and Housing Consumption

Adam Goldstein, Orestes P. Hastings

Sociological Science, May 22, 2019
10.15195/v6.a16


Social scientists have suggested that a key sociobehavioral consequence of rising inequality is intensifying market competition for advantageous positions in the opportunity structure, such as residences that afford access to high-quality public schools. We assess empirical implications of inequality-fueled positional competition theories (PCTs) by analyzing the relationships between metropolitan income inequality, households’ efforts to secure residential positions in desirable school districts, and housing consumption behavior. We assemble a unique data set, which contains longitudinal information on household finances, residences, and geographic locations from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics; information on the quality of the school attendance areas in which these households reside; and information about the local real estate market. We find that greater inequality is associated with steeper housing price premia for residences in desirable areas, more pronounced social class sorting on school quality when relocating, and greater salience of schools relative to other housing amenities in families’ housing expenditure functions. Families in high-inequality regions exhibit modestly greater willingness to pay more (relative to their own incomes) for a given improvement in school desirability. The analysis brings important empirical nuance to oft-invoked but untested theories about positional competition as a mechanism by which inequality affects behaviors, consumption, and markets.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Adam Goldstein: Departments of Sociology and Public Affairs, Princeton University
E-mail: amg5@princeton.edu

Orestes P. Hastings: Department of Sociology, Colorado State University
E-mail: Pat.Hastings@colostate.edu

Acknowledgements: The authors are grateful for helpful suggestions from Marianne Bertrand, Neil Fligstein, Kevin McKee, Ann Owens, Peter Rich, participants at the Tobin Project Conference on Inequality and Decision Making, and the editors of Sociological Science. This research was partially supported by funding from the Tobin Project. The first author was also supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Collection of the PSID data used in this study was partly supported by the National Institutes of Health (grants R01 HD069609 and R01 AG040213) and the National Science Foundation (awards SES 1157698 and 1623684).

  • Citation: Goldstein, Adam, and Orestes P. Hastings. 2019. “Buying In: Positional Competition, Schools, Income Inequality, and Housing Consumption.” Sociological Science 6: 416-445.
  • Received: September 12, 2018
  • Accepted: March 22, 2019
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
  • DOI: 10.15195/v6.a16


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