A Life Course Perspective of Community (Non)Investment: Historical Financial Service Trajectories and Community Outcomes

Megan Doherty Bea ()
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Megan Doherty Bea: University of Wisconsin-Madison

Journal of Family and Economic Issues, 2024, vol. 45, issue 2, No 4, 288-307

Abstract: Abstract Drawing on techniques more commonly used to study changes within families over time, this paper highlights how holistic life course methods can help scholars conceptualize the dynamic nature of local built environments and measure impacts for families and communities. I use a novel dataset on the historical availability of banks, credit unions, and alternative financial services (AFS) between 2003 and 2015 to classify neighborhoods by their financial service trajectories using sequence and cluster analyses. I identify six distinct trajectories of financial service availability over the 13-year period; neighborhoods in these trajectories differ in terms of their socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. Descriptive multivariate analyses confirm that trajectories are linked to community outcomes at the end of the period; tracts exposed to AFS at some point over the 13 years are associated with higher predicted end-of-period poverty rates compared to both tracts that are only exposed to banks and credit unions and tracts that are chronic financial service deserts. Extensions of this approach to other aspects of the built environment are discussed.

Keywords: Communities; Financial services; Poverty; Sequence analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1007/s10834-023-09924-w

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