Jeffrey Kling Greg Duncan Lawrence Katz Ronald Kessler Jens Ludwig
Changes in population migration, housing policy, and other public policies have produced substantial changes in the racial and economic segregation of America's residential neighborhoods. This project studies: the links between mental processes and human behavior as behaviors have changed over time in response to changes in community environment. Data from a randomized housing voucher experiment known as Moving to Opportunity (MTO) is used to identify the long-term effects of changes in neighborhood environment on the behavior of low-income, mostly minority families who were originally living in high-poverty public housing projects. Random assignment of housing vouchers in MTO generates comparable groups of people living in different types of neighborhoods, which help identify the causal effects of neighborhood environments on behavior. In 2007, data on long-term outcomes (about 10 years after randomization) will be collected from 6800 youth ages 10 to 20 and from 4600 adults. Outcomes include survey data on measures of schooling, employment, risky behaviors; reading and math achievement tests; and administrative data on arrests, employment, welfare and schooling. The project aims to better understand the behavioral mechanisms behind neighborhood effects on behavior. The search for such mechanisms focuses on understanding the gender difference in youth responses to neighborhood change that were the most important scientific and policy puzzle found in the previous research, and which echoes the difference in outcomes over time in national data for African- American males and females
Broader Impacts. By presenting what are arguably the first credible estimates of the long-term effects of neighborhood change on low-income families, this project will provide important guidance both for housing policies that affect the geographic concentration of poverty and for community-development programs. These findings are expected to be of interest to scholars across the sciences as well as to policymakers and practitioners. The research process behind this project may also help seed new networks that bring together researchers from a broad array of disciplines. The survey data collected as part of this project will be made available through a data sharing agreement that we have established with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and should be of interest to social science, biomedical, and public health researchers.
