Moving to Opportunity's Impact on Health and Well-Being Among High-Dosage Participants

This article reports the health impacts of the Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration Program for the subset of participants who were most likely to spend more time in low-poverty neighborhoods. Using the methodological approach developed by Peck, we find that children whose profiles predict that they spent more time in lower-poverty neighborhoods experience higher neighborhood and housing quality, improved mental health outcomes, and better general health relative to their control-group counterparts. Moving to Opportunity's impact on these likely "high-dosage" participants is larger in magnitude than intention-to-treat impact estimates produced by prior studies. Further, while prior work found no evidence that neighborhoods affect overall child health, we find that parents who are likely to spend more time in lower-poverty neighborhoods are significantly more likely to report very good or excellent child health. In contrast, those who are not likely to spend more time in lower-poverty neighborhoods show some evidence of unfavorable health impacts.