The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment
The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment offered randomly selected families housing vouchers to move from high poverty housing projects to lower poverty neighborhoods. We analyze MTO's impacts on children's long term outcomes using tax data. We find that moving to a lower poverty neighborhood when young (before age 13) increases college attendance and earnings and reduces single parenthood rates. Moving as an adolescent has slightly negative impacts, perhaps because of disruption effects. The decline in the gains from moving with the age when children move suggests that the duration of exposure to better environments during childhood is an important determinant of children's long term outcomes.
The American economic review