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This paper investigates neighbourhood characteristics related to an individual's likelihood of getting the first COVID-19 vaccination and implementing official recommendations for the three-shot vaccination regime. We use full population-geocoded microdata for Sweden to measure important individual-level attributes and the marginalisation of their residential communities in terms of ethnicity, education and income. The findings show that the likelihood of getting vaccinated and obtaining all three recommended vaccine doses decrease for individuals residing in neighbourhoods with larger shares of marginalised residents. The effects also appear to be more pronounced if the individual themself belongs to a marginalised group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted a debate about whether marginalized communities suffered the disproportionate brunt of the pandemic's mortality. Empirical studies addressing this question typically suffer from statistical uncertainties and potential biases associated with uneven and incomplete reporting. We use geo-coded micro-level data for the entire population of Sweden to analyze how local neighborhood characteristics affect the likelihood of dying with COVID-19 at individual level, given the individual's overall risk of death. We control for several individual and regional characteristics to compare the results in specific communities to overall death patterns in Sweden during 2020. When accounting for the probability to die of any cause, we find that individuals residing in socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods were not more likely to die with COVID-19 than individuals residing elsewhere. Importantly, we do find that individuals show a generally higher probability of death in these neighborhoods. Nevertheless, ethnicity is an important explanatory factor for COVID-19 deaths for foreign-born individuals, especially from East Africa, who are more likely to pass away regardless of residential neighborhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate whether an individual's information milieu―an individual's residential neighborhood and co-workers―affects the decision to get a COVID-19 vaccine. The decision to accept or refuse a vaccine is intensely personal and involves the processing of information about phenomena likely to be unfamiliar to most individuals. One can thus expect an interplay between an individual's level of education and skills and the information processing of others whom with whom she can interact and whose decision she can probe and observe. Using individual-level data for adults in Sweden, we can identify the proportion of an individual's neighborhood and workplace who are unvaccinated as indicators of possible peer effects. We find that individuals with low levels of educational attainment and occupational skills are more likely to be unvaccinated when exposed to other unvaccinated individuals at work and in the residential neighborhood. The peer effects in each of these information milieus further increases the likelihood of not getting vaccinated—with the two acting as information channels that reinforce one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]