Economics Letters 79 (2003) 231–237 www.elsevier.com / locate / econbase Are point-in-time measures of neighborhood characteristics useful proxies for children’s long-run neighborhood environment? a b c, * Jim Kunz , Marianne E. Page , Gary Solon a University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA b University of California-Davis, Davis, CA, USA c Department of Economics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1220, USA Received 18 September 2002; accepted 10 October 2002 Abstract How well do the point-in-time neighborhood measures commonly used in studies of neighborhood effects represent longer-run neighborhood environment? Our evidence on children’s year-to-year correlations in neighborhood characteristics suggests that the neighborhood a child inhabits at a particular time is a reasonable proxy for her long-run environment, and that relying on such a proxy produces only a small errors-in-variables bias.  2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Neighborhood effects; Measurement error; Geographic mobility JEL classification: Z13; J61 1. Introduction Numerous social scientists have estimated the degree to which children’s neighborhood environ- ment affects their future socioeconomic status as adults. Most studies of neighborhood effects have estimated regression models relating selected individual outcomes (such as educational attainment, earnings, and family income) to various neighborhood characteristics (such as median income, mean years of education, racial composition, and the employment rate). Others have examined the importance of both observable and unobservable neighborhood characteristics by estimating correla- *Corresponding author. Tel.: 11-734-763-1306; fax: 11-734-764-2769. E-mail addresses: jkunz@ssw.umaryland.edu (J. Kunz), mepage@ucdavis.edu (M.E. Page), gsolon@umich.edu (G. Solon). 0165-1765 / 02 / $ – see front matter  2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016 / S0165-1765(02)00324-5