Concentrated Poverty and Social Mobility

This project will analyze the discrepancy between results from Moving to Opportunity (MTO) and other studies, including the possibilities that: (a) MTO families may be more disadvantaged than those examined in previous neighborhood effects studies; (b) MTO did not generate as large a change in neighborhood conditions as what is captured by previous datasets and studies; (c) MTO families interacted with one another in ways that undermined the experiment’s ability to detect neighborhood effects; and (d) previous non-experimental studies confound the causal effects of neighborhoods on people’s outcomes with unobserved attributes associated with both outcomes and neighborhood selection (“selection bias”). The research will extend these analyses to examine youth as well as adult outcomes, and disseminate them widely throughout both the scientific and policy communities to ensure they have an impact on real-world policy decisions.