This study focuses on 540 households originally living in public housing in high-poverty areas of Boston who participated in HUD’s Moving To Opportunity (MTO) demonstration. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups: Experimental – offered mobility counseling and a Section 8...

Physical height is an important economic variable re ecting health and human capital. Puzzlingly, however, differences in average height across developing countries are not well explained by differences in wealth. In particular, children in India are shorter, on average, than children in Africa...

We examine the effects of moving out of high-poverty neighborhoods on the outcomes of teenage youth, a population often seen as most at risk from the adverse effects of such neighborhoods. The randomized design of the Moving To Opportunity demonstration allows us to compare groups of youth,...

There is currently much debate about the effectiveness of foreign aid and about what kind of projects can engender economic development. There is skepticism about the ability of econometric analysis to resolve these issues, or of development agencies to learn from their own experience. In...

We analyze the effects of neighborhood characteristics on the mortality of black male youth in families relocated through the Gautreaux program, a residential mobility program implemented in Chicago in 1976. While we find significant evidence of neighborhood selfselection by families...

The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration assigned housing vouchers via random lottery to low-income public housing residents in five cities. We use the exogenous variation in residential locations generated by the MTO demonstration to estimate the effects of neighborhoods on youth crime and...

Deaton and Lubotsky (2003) found that the robust positive relationship across American cities between mortality and income inequality became small, insignificant, and/or non-robust once they controlled for the fraction of each city’s population that is black. Ash and Robinson (Ash, M., &...

People whose family income was less than $5,000 in 1980 could expect to live about 25 percent fewer years than people whose family income was greater than $50,000. We explore this finding using both individual data and a panel of aggregate birth cohorts observed from 1975 to 1995. We assume that...

Hurricane Katrina displaced approximately 650,000 people and destroyed or severely damaged 217,000 homes along the Gulf Coast. Damage was especially severe in New Orleans, and the return of displaced residents to this city has been slow. The fraction of households receiving mail (which, in the...

Roll Back Malaria aims at halving the current burden of the disease by the year 2010. The focus is on sub-Saharan Africa, and it is proposed to implement efficacious and costeffective control strategies. However, the evidence-base of such information is scarce, and a notable missing element is...