Creating Moves to Opportunity: Experimental Evidence on Barriers to Neighborhood Choice

By Peter Bergman, Raj Chetty, Stefanie DeLuca, Nathaniel Hendren, Lawrence F. Katz, C. Palmer. The American Economic Review, 2019

164 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Low-income families often live in low-upward-mobility neighborhoods. We study why by using a randomized trial with housing voucher recipients that provided information, financial support, and customized search assistance to move to high-opportunity neighborhoods. The treatment increased the fraction moving to high-upward-mobility areas from 15 to 53 percent. A second trial reveals this treatment effect is driven primarily by customized search assistance. Qualitative interviews show that the intervention relaxed bandwidth constraints and addressed family-specific needs. Our findings imply many low-income families do not have strong preferences to stay in low-opportunity areas and that barriers in housing search significantly increase residential segregation by income. (JEL D83, G51, R21, R23, R31, R38)

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/35bab0d0c6865f38b9f7cdebddca7c7455a38c64

Citations in the corpus

• The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility (2018, unknown): “program conducted by the Seattle and King County housing authorities helps housing voucher recipients move to higher-opportunity areas based on the Opportunity Atlas statistics (Bergman et al. 2019); a recent bill proposes to scale that approach nationally.”