In the last 30 years we have witnessed a steep increase of published work on neighborhood effects on various social outcomes (Sampson et al., 2002). Meanwhile, reliable empirical evidence for such effects on educational outcomes remains rather controversial. Besides the difficulties of an adequate theoretical conceptualization of the social mechanisms and the appropriate operationalization of the spatial scale of "neighborhood", the statistical modeling of these mechanisms remains a major concern. The presence of selection bias as well as the "reflection problem" are the main statistical challenges not only in the field of neighborhood effect studies but in any area concerned with compositional and contextual influences (Manski, 1993).

Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the controversial pattern of neighborhood effects can be explained - at least partially - by the method under study (Galster and Hedman, 2013). The present paper takes this undesirable situation as a starting point and asks for the prevalence of neighborhood effects in the city of Zurich, Switzerland. Using a sophisticated methodology to overcome the above mentioned limitations and building on an extensive literature on processes of collective socialization in the neighborhood context, the epidemic theory of the diffusion of divergent norms, and thoughts on structural influences of neighborhoods' social institutions, complex and intertwined effects on elementary students' educational achievement are expected. Whereas the collective socialization hypothesis focuses on positive effects of high status residents on children's educational achievement (measured in the present case as the math grade in the 6^th school year; i.e., at the transition to secondary school tracks) due to the presence of positive role models, the epidemic theory postulates negative effects due to emerging norms in the neighborhood context that shape children's attitudes toward schooling and encourage disruptive behavior (Wilson, 1987). On the other hand, the institutional perspective focuses on structural constraints and advantages of the varying provision with services and amenities among neighborhoods (Häussermann, 2003).

Thereby, these effects most likely differ not only by individual social resources and gender (Andersson and Malmberg, 2013) but both, the collective socialization and the epidemic theory imply the presence of non-linear effects and tipping points which have to be addressed analytically as well as empirically. Furthermore, to ensure the theoretical advancement, this study explicitly formulates and models the mediating social mechanisms of neighborhood effects. Both, the collective socialization and the epidemic theory perspective stress the importance of interacting with significant others for the transmission of such effects in the neighborhood context. Therefore, social interaction or - more generally speaking - the integration into a localized social network (as well as the adaption of deviant norms) is introduced and empirically modeled as the key mediating social mechanism to explain neighborhood effects on educational attainment.

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