Experimental Analysis of Neighborhood Effects

Abstract

Families, primarily female-headed minority households with children, living in highpoverty public housing projects in five U.S. cities were offered housing vouchers by lottery in the Moving to Opportunity program. Four to seven years after random assignment, families offered vouchers lived in safer neighborhoods that had lower poverty rates than those of the control group not offered vouchers. We find no significant overall effects of this intervention on adult economic self-sufficiency or physical health. Mental health benefits of the voucher offers for adults and for female youth were substantial. Beneficial effects for female youth on education, risky behavior, and physical health were offset by adverse effects for male youth. For outcomes exhibiting significant treatment effects, we find, using variation in treatment intensity across voucher types and cities, that the relationship between neighborhood poverty rate and outcomes is approximately linear.JEL classifications: H43, I18, I38, J38. Keywords: social experiment; housing vouchers, neighborhoods, mental health, urban poverty 1 This paper integrates material previously circulated in , Liebman et al. (2004). Support for this research was provided by grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD) and the National Institute of Mental Health (R01-HD40404 and R01-HD40444), the National Science Foundation (9876337 and 0091854), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the W.T. Grant Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation. Additional support was provided by grants to Princeton University from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and from NICHD (5P30-HD32030 for the Office of Population Research), by the Princeton Industrial Relations Section, the Bendheim-Thomas Center for Research on Child Wellbeing, the Princeton Center for Health and Wellbeing, and the National Bureau of Economic Research. We are grateful to Todd Richardson and Mark Shroder of HUD; to Eric Beecroft, Judie Feins, Barbara Goodson, Robin Jacob, Stephen Kennedy, Larry Orr, and Rhiannon Patterson of Abt Associates; to our collaborators Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Alessandra Del Conte Dickovick, Greg Duncan, Tama Leventhal, Jens Ludwig, Bruce Psaty, Lisa Sanbonmatsu, and Robert Whitaker; to our research assistants Ken Fortson, Jane Garrison, Erin Metcalf, and Josh Meltzer; and to numerous colleagues and three anonymous referees for valuable suggestions. Any findings or conclusions expressed are those of the authors. 1The residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods fare substantially worse on a wide range of socioeconomic and health outcomes than do those with more affluent neighbors. Economic models of residential sorting --partially motivated by these observed associations between neighborhood characteristics and individual outcomes --suggest that inefficient equilibria can arise when individual outcomes are influenced by neighbors and ind...

The Dialectic of Neighborhood Social Mix: Editors' Introduction to the Special Issue

“…The MTO research design randomly assigns public housing residents who volunteer to participate to one of three experimental groups: (1) controls that get no voucher but can stay in public housing in disadvantaged neighborhoods; (2) recipients of rental vouchers; and (3) recipients of rental vouchers and relocation assistance who had to move to neighborhoods with , 10 per cent poverty rates and remain for at least a year. Most investigations of MTO data uncovered no substantial neighborhood effects on adult labor market outcomes (e.g., Goering & Feins, 2003;Katz et al, 2001;Kling et al, 2007;Ludwig, 2012;Ludwig et al, 2000Ludwig et al, , 2001aLudwig et al, , 2001bLudwig et al, , 2008Orr et al, 2003;Sanbonmatsu et al, 2011). Moreover, MTO-based studies indicated small or insignificant neighborhood effects on youth educational outcomes (Kling et al, 2007;Ludwig et al, 2001b;Sanbonmatsu et al, 2011).…”

“…Most investigations of MTO data uncovered no substantial neighborhood effects on adult labor market outcomes (e.g., Goering & Feins, 2003;Katz et al, 2001;Kling et al, 2007;Ludwig, 2012;Ludwig et al, 2000Ludwig et al, , 2001aLudwig et al, , 2001bLudwig et al, , 2008Orr et al, 2003;Sanbonmatsu et al, 2011). Moreover, MTO-based studies indicated small or insignificant neighborhood effects on youth educational outcomes (Kling et al, 2007;Ludwig et al, 2001b;Sanbonmatsu et al, 2011). 7 Sweeping negative conclusions are inappropriate given the substantial shortcomings of MTO as a test of neighborhood effects (cf.…”

Can War Foster Cooperation?

“…In particular, for each study, we generate a mean effect across all available outcomes (following Kling and Liebman 2004;Kling, Liebman, and Katz 2007) where the indices are calculated from the standardized outcome measures of each study.…”

Durable effects of concentrated disadvantage on verbal ability among African-American children

“…First, observational data suggest that neighborhood poverty is associated with the inconsistency of maternal parenting practices within the home (5,6), and the strongest findings based on a randomized voucher experiment in the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program (7) show that moving to neighborhoods with relatively low poverty rates has a substantial positive impact on caregivers' mental health. Hence, there are plausible theoretical reasons to hypothesize that neighborhood disadvantage constrains parental practices and the family environment ''under the roof'' (8), which may in turn bear on cognitive achievement.…”