This paper examines the short-run impacts of a change in residential neighborhood on the well-being of low-income families, using evidence from a program in which eligibility for a housing voucher was determined by random lottery. We examine the experiences of households at the Boston site of Moving To Opportunity (MTO), a demonstration program in five cities. Families in high poverty public housing projects applied to MTO and were assigned by lottery to one of three groups: Experimental -- offered mobility counseling and a Section 8 subsidy valid only in a Census tract with a poverty rate of less than 10 percent; Section 8 Comparison -- offered a geographically unrestricted Section 8 subsidy; or Control -- offered no new assistance, but continued to be eligible for public housing.

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JEL No. C10 The major contributions of twentieth century econometrics to knowledge were the definition of causal parameters when agents are constrained by resources and markets and causes are interrelated, the analysis of what is required to recover causal parameters from data (the identification problem), and clarification of the role of causal parameters in policy evaluation and in forecasting the effects of policies never previously experienced. This paper summarizes the development of those ideas by the Cowles Commission, the response to their work by structural econometricians and VAR econometricians, and the response to structural and VAR econometrics by calibrators, advocates of natural and social experiments, and by nonparametric econometricians and statisticians.

This paper presents a productivity argument for investing in disadvantaged young children. For such investment, there is no equity-efficiency tradeoff.

This paper addresses microeconometric evaluation by matching methods when the programs under consideration are heterogeneous. Assuming that selection into the different sub-programs and the potential outcomes are independent given observable characteristics, estimators based on different propensity scores are compared and applied to the analysis of active labor market policies in the Swiss region of Zurich. Furthermore, the issues of heterogeneous effects and aggregation are addressed. The results suggest that an approach that incorporates the possibility of having multiple programs can be an informative tool in applied work.

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R01-HD32058-03, and the American Bar Foundation. Carneiro was funded by Fundacao Ciencia e Tecnologia and Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian. We have beneÞted from comments received

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