The Truly Disadvantaged has been a stepping stone for a great deal of research on the neighbourhood effect, particularly on education, exploring the impacts of neighborhoods on an individual's outcome and performance in life.
For example, Murray and colleagues have shown that older workers living in areas with higher unemployment are less likely to be in work ten years later[6] and retire at earlier ages.
[7] A small number of studies using data from across the life course have found that neighbourhood effects on economic outcomes, such as earning, tend to accumulate over time.
[11] This hypothesis is supported by Catherine Ross[12] who shows that socially disordered neighborhoods are associated with depressive symptoms.
As an example of the influence of such scholarship, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 included money to assist poor inner cities with schools, police, and homelessness.
A study done by Daniel J. Hopkins and Thad Williamson found that neighborhoods with dense populations were more likely to be politically involved than scattered communities because of the higher chance of unscripted interpersonal interaction.
While not the first use of the term in economic writing, Milton Friedman used the concept in 1955, in his essay The Role of Government in Education, in which he suggested that:[17] the existence of substantial "neighborhood effects" [were action where] one individual imposes significant costs on other individuals for which it is not feasible to make [the first individual] compensate them or yields significant gains to them for which it is not feasible to make them compensate [the first individual] [, and that such circumstances might] make voluntary exchange impossibleKevin Cox used the term in 1969 in 'The Voting Decision in a Spatial Context'[18] and it was later further popularized by Ron J. Johnston in 'Political Geography' (1979) and Peter J. Taylor and G. Gudgin in 'Geography of Elections' (1979)[19][20] It seems, at the time at least, that they were attempting to justify the use of mathematical modeling in the study of voting patterns and the correlations between spatial data.
Both seem to have made a case that studying this is only possible with good quantitative data and an understanding of how people in these small spatial areas live, work, and think.
'[27] Curtice argued, from his data set, that the influence on voting patterns by social interactions is of such small consequence as to be nearly negligible in explaining the neighbourhood effect.
[29] The neighborhood effect on education can impact the quality of teachers, school programs, clubs, and campus environment students might experience.
Multiple studies confirm that a "neighborhood's poverty, a poor educational climate, the proportion of ethnic/migrant groups, and social disorganization"[30] together all contribute to the lack of academic success among students in that area.