The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment

The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment provided housing vouchers to randomly selected families living in high-poverty housing projects. The vouchers allowed families to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods. Using administrative data from tax returns, the authors of this report present new evidence on the impacts of MTO on children’s long-term outcomes. They find that moving to a lower-poverty neighborhood significantly improves college attendance rates and earnings for children who were younger than 13 years of age at the time of moving. Children also live in better neighborhoods as adults and are less likely to become single parents.