As a spatial unit of residents’ daily lives, the community is an important ‘interface’ between the state and society, and it is also the most knowledge-intensive space. The community is an important place for collective socialization and social control. The neighborhood effect of community environment shaping will significantly affect individual behaviors and educational achievements (Rumberger, 2004). After the commercialization of housing in cities, Chinese families have self-selected the residential community that best matches their preferences through ‘voting with their feet’. The redistribution policy cannot prevent the gathering of similar socio-economic status groups, and the neighborhood environment has a more profound impact on personal development. The children of families in backward communities may find it difficult to escape the trap of intergenerational transmission of poverty, and the inequality caused by community segregation cannot be ignored (Chetty et al., 2016a).
In ancient China, in order to make Mencius had a better learning environment and avoided the influence of neighbors’ occupations, Mencius’ mother changed their family address three times and then spread to later generations with “Mencius’ mother makes three moves”. On the one hand, cognitive abilities have an important impact on personal development. Adolescents’ cognitive abilities are a necessary basis for their educational achievements (Heckman and Kautz, 2012), and it has an important impact on their income and career in adulthood (Sternberg et al. 2001), mental health and life expectancy (Whalley and Deary 2001) as well as long-term effects. Although cognitive abilities are influenced by genetic factors, with the increase in children’s age, it is more susceptible to environmental factors at the family, community, and individual levels (Deary et al., 2007; Soelen et al., 2011).
Regarding cognitive abilities’ influencing factors of non-market interaction, most of the existing studies explore the impact of these factors on the cognitive abilities of adolescents from the perspectives of community poverty concentration, juvenile crime rate, racial segmentation, and housing ownership (Lundquist and Massey 2008; Manners et al., 2009; Leventhal and Gunn, 2005). Existing studies have paid relatively insufficient attention to the spillover effect of skill aggregation within the community residents on adolescents’ cognitive abilities.
On the other hand, after China’s reform and opening up, the market-oriented housing price formation mechanism has promoted the high-skilled class with higher economic status to choose the best to live through high-price purchasing. While the disadvantaged class, represented by low-skilled workers and rural-urban migrants, has formed a poverty-gathering area, triggering the problem of residential segregation (Monkkonen et al., 2017). Because the mobility range and community selectivity of the disadvantaged class are less than those of the dominant class, the spatial heterogeneity of different classes reduces the frequency of communication and interaction between communities, which is not conducive to the spillover of human capital from the dominant community to the backward community, and it weakens the possibility that knowledge diffusion in backward communities, which will lead to higher levels of labor output, increases the probability of intergenerational transmission of poverty in the backward community, and finally expands the gap between the rich and the poor within the region. How to measure the difference of such spatial agglomeration, and whether the new form of neighborhood environment will affect the cognitive ability of early children has become the core issues to be discussed in this paper.
In the current research on the neighborhood effect, the selection of neighborhood feature variables is usually based on different classifications of influence effects (Sampson and Sharkey, 2008), while lack of research on the influence of neighborhood characteristics on individual behavior. In a typical relational society such as China (Bian, 1997), the interaction and communication between people are affected by the group effect. Community segregation makes the growth of children of different classes more susceptible to the influence of non-consanguineous adults around them, which is highlighted by the role model and supervision of neighbors in the formation of cognitive ability. However, few studies have confirmed this causal relationship. Occupation is the basis for individuals to obtain income and enjoy a certain social status, and its demonstration effect is reflected by the spillover of human capital, while the skill level of occupation is a better representative of human capital (Kambourov and Manovskii, 2009). Based on this, in order to take into accounting the differences in spatial agglomeration of resources and the interaction between community residents, we try to use community vocational skills as the proxy variable of neighborhood effect.
This paper uses the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS) to examine the impact of community-level skills on students’ cognitive ability. Studies have shown that higher levels of neighborhood skills can significantly improve students’ cognitive ability when factors such as family economic status are controlled. Further analysis shows that the educational expectation caused by the role model effect is an important transmission mechanism. Good neighborhood occupation and family economic status provide students with positive learning and reference standards. Therefore, students and parents have a correct expectation of educational return, which encourages them to pursue higher academic achievement and educational attainment.
Education is an important channel to improve class mobility, and education equity is an important part of social equity. In order to explore the influence of neighborhood vocational skills on students’ cognitive ability and its relationship with educational equity, we conducted a comparative analysis of individuals, families, and communities among different student groups. The results show that in terms of individual students, the promotion effect of good neighborhood vocational skills on students’ cognitive ability is significantly higher in girls, sub-health status, and senior groups than in other groups. In terms of social interaction, students with a harmonious atmosphere, rich families, and less time with parents will be more positively affected by good neighborhood vocational skills on cognitive ability. In terms of community, students in communities with better hardware facilities and “school district housing” will be more positively affected by excellent neighborhood vocational skills on cognitive ability.
At present, China is confronted with a residential segregation problem after the marketization of housing prices. How to solve the dilemma of educational inequality caused by typical segregation phenomena such as “campus housing” and “urban villages”, and improve the level of human capital accumulation of vulnerable groups has become the focus of neighborhood environment research. This paper will provide empirical evidence for public policy on neighborhood vocational skills and its transmission mechanism. The contribution is mainly reflected in the following aspects: First, under the background of residential segregation and group effect, this paper discusses the social impact of neighborhood vocational skills, and puts residential segregation, neighborhood occupational skills, and their social and economic consequences into a unified analysis framework, which is helpful to better understand the limiting factors of human capital diffusion and the formation mechanism of intergenerational transmission of poverty. It deepens the existing research depth from the dual perspectives of both theoretical level and empirical tests and makes up for the lack of research on the neighborhood environment. Secondly, this paper identifies the transmission mechanism by which neighborhood vocational skills enhance students’ and parents’ educational expectations through the role model effect, thus improving students’ cognitive ability. It enriches the mechanism research of the neighborhood environment. Thirdly, community vocational skills are measured by the vocational skill level of the people who mainly live around them, which can overcome the limitation of using an economic basis as the classification of community identifybefore, and make the research conclusion more generalized. Fourth, the government’s education subsidies and school accommodation support can eliminate or weaken the research conclusions of the impact of neighborhood environment on students’ cognitive ability, which has important reference significance for the formulation of fair education policies.
The follow-up structure of the article is as follows. The second part of this article briefly describes the existing relevant research. The third part introduces the setting of the data and measurement model. The fourth part presents the empirical results and related analysis. The fifth part makes a more in-depth discussion of endogenous problems and other influencing factors; the sixth part is a conclusion.