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Working Paper
Neighborhood Sorting Obscures Neighborhood Effects in the Opportunity Atlas
The Opportunity Atlas (OA) is an innovative data set that ranks neighborhoods according to children’s adult outcomes in several domains, including income. Conceptually, outcomes offer new evidence about neighborhood effects when measured in isolation from neighborhood sorting. This paper shows that neighborhood sorting contributes to OA estimates. We document cases in which small sample sizes and changes over time can explain disagreements between OA rankings and those based on contemporaneous variables. Our results suggest caution for interpretations of the OA data set at a granular level, ...
Working Paper
What Determines the Success of Housing Mobility Programs?
This paper studies how design features influence the success of Housing Mobility Programs (HMPs) in reducing racial segregation. Targeting neighborhoods based on previous residents' outcomes does not allow for targeting race-specific outcomes, generates uncertainty when targeting income-specific outcomes, and generates bias in ranking neighborhoods' effects. Moreover, targeting opportunity bargains based on previous residents' outcomes selects tracts with large disagreements in current and previous residents' outcomes, with such disagreements predicted by sorting since 1990. HMP success is ...
Working Paper
Neighborhood Choices, Neighborhood Effects and Housing Vouchers
We study how households choose neighborhoods, how neighborhoods affect child ability, and how housing vouchers influence neighborhood choices and child outcomes. We use two new panel data sets with tract-level detail for Los Angeles county to estimate a dynamic model of optimal tract-level location choice for renting households and, separately, the impact of living in a given tract on child test scores (which we call ?child ability" throughout). We simulate optimal location choices and changes in child ability of the poorest households in our sample under various housing-voucher policies. We ...
Working Paper
What Determines the Success of Housing Mobility Programs?
There is currently interest in crafting public housing policy that combats, rather than contributes to, the residential segregation in American cities. One such policy is the Housing Mobility Program (HMP), which aims to help people move from disinvested neighborhoods to ones with more opportunities. This paper studies how design features influence the success of HMPs in reducing racial segregation. We find that the choice of neighborhood opportunity index used to define the opportunity areas to which participants are encouraged to move has limited influence on HMP success. In contrast, we ...