NBER Working Papers by Greg Duncan

We examine long-term neighborhood effects on low-income families using data from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) randomized housing-mobility experiment, which offered some public-housing families but not others the chance to move to less-disadvantaged neighborhoods. We show that 10-15 years after baseline MTO improves adult physical and mental health; has no detectable effect on economic outcomes, youth schooling and youth physical health; and mixed results by gender on other youth outcomes, with girls doing better on some measures and boys doing worse. Despite the somewhat mixed pattern of impacts on traditional behavioral outcomes, MTO moves substantially improve adult subjective well-being.

Families originally living in public housing were assigned housing vouchers by lottery, encouraging moves to neighborhoods with lower poverty rates. Although we had hypothesized that reading and math test scores would be higher among children in families offered vouchers (with larger effects among younger children), the results show no significant effects on test scores for any age group among over 5000 children ages 6 to 20 in 2002 who were assessed four to seven years after randomization. Program impacts on school environments were considerably smaller than impacts on neighborhoods, suggesting that achievement-related benefits from improved neighborhood environments are alone small.

This paper reports evidence on the error properties of survey reports of labor market variables such as earnings and work hours. Our primary data source is the PSID Validation Study, a two-wave panel survey of a sample of workers employed by a large firm which also allowed us access to its very detailed records of its workers earnings. etc. The second data source uses individuals' 1977 and 1978 (March Current Population Survey) reports of earnings, matched to Social Security earnings records. In both data sets, individuals: reports of earnings are fairly accurately reported, and the errors are negatively related to true earnings. The latter property reduces the bias due to measurement error when earnings are used as an independent variable, but (unlike the classical-error case) leads to so...