Abstract

The research project analyses small scale neighbourhood effects on the dynamics in basic income support. The neighbourhood constitutes an influential factor on individual behaviour. During basic income receipt relocations due to financial reasons are commonplace, thus changing the living environment. Previous research has found that unfavourable regional contexts can act as unemployment traps (e.g. Windzio, 2004 or Nonnenmacher, 2009; 2013), but only based on data on higher regional levels of states or labour market regions (e.g. Patacchini & Zenou, 2007; Harder, 2014) or on data from case studies of cities or selected urban neighbourhoods (Atkinson & Kintrea, 2001; Friedrichs & Blasius, 2003). Effects should be expected to be on lower regional levels, like the daily living environment. At the least effects from higher regions should be moderated by lower-level contexts. Previous research has found that existing data on lower level context effects are not fine-grained enough (Nonnenmacher, 2007) or only provide limited information compared to survey data (Raudenbush & Sampson, 1999). Georeferencing the home addresses of respondents to the PASS survey provides the data for our small-scale analysis. Georeferencing matches geographic coordinates to PASS respondents, allowing us to match data on the surrounding small scale area (e.g. the surrounding square kilometre) like the location and quality of the neighbourhood. This new data-set in combination with rich PASS panel data enables us to systematically assess small scale context effects on a large scale.