Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment aimed at revealing if moving households to the areas with lower poverty rates will affect the future of children (Chetty, Hendren, and Katz 855). In order to generate the results, the researchers set a longitudinal experiment that involved 4,604 low-income families from several U.S. cities including Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. The criteria for inclusion into the experiment were low income, availability of children, and residing in the public housing. The families were moved from 1994 to 1998 while a follow-up was conducted in 2012. The families were divided into three groups, experimental group that received vouchers for MTO, the second group that was provided certain housing vouchers, yet no relocation was accomplished, and a control group who remained in the same place. The participants were required to pay rent for 30 percent of their income.
The data for the experiment was collected through three sources. First of all, the researchers gathered information from the HDU files made for MTO participants. The focus of the research was on the MTO children who were 18 years of younger. Overall, the study paid attention only to the outcomes of individuals who were 21 years old or older. The researchers used MTO Participant Baseline Survey to evaluate the participants from the experimental group, which gathered the data on the socio-economic background. Also, the survey conducted in 2008/2010 among these participants was assessed by the researchers as well. The second set of information was collected through the tax data of each participant. This type of data allowed the study to detect if the participants attend colleges, their income, quality of a college, marital status, neighborhood characteristics, as well as tax filed and paid. The third pool of data was generated from the balance tests and summary statistics that evaluated the difference in outcomes between the control group and experimental group.
During the analysis of data, the researchers divided the children into two groups, those younger than adolescents and those who reached adolescence. It was important to reveal how the timing of moving to the better neighborhood may affect the outcomes for the development of the individual. In order to analyze the data, the researchers used statistical instruments measuring the information gathered from three groups of the participants.
The results generated during the course of the study determined that MTO experiments did not affect the income of adults, which was also indicated by the previous research. The duration of the exposure to the low-income neighborhoods, according to the findings, influence the level of income in adults. At the same time, younger children who did not reach adolescence experienced the major positive effect of the MTO experiment, as their earnings in adulthood and the quality of higher educational establishment indicated better results comparing to the control group. Simultaneously, children who reached adolescence experienced negative outcomes when moved to the better neighborhoods. Also, the second group that received vouchers gained certain benefits, yet there was not practical significant result. At the same time, the research had a list of limitations that possibly interfered with the results of the study. First of all, not all initial participants of the study were evaluated after the MTO, as a lot of them refused to participate in a follow-up. Therefore, the findings could be different if the initial 4,604 households were assessed. In addition, during the period of living in better neighborhoods, some of the families moved to the low-income areas and some of the households from the control group moved to the better areas, which automatically excluded them from the follow-up. Yet, it is considered that there were no serious threats to validity, reliability, or credibility of the research.
Works Cited
Chetty, Raj, Hendren, Nathaniel and Katz, Lawrence. The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment. American Economic Review 106.4, (2016): 855–902.
