Capitalism and Freedom

Families, primarily female-headed minority households with children, living in high-poverty public housing projects in five U.S. cities were offered housing vouchers by lottery in the Moving to Opportunity program. Four to seven years after random assignment, families offered vouchers lived in safer neighborhoods that had lower poverty rates than those of the control group not offered vouchers. We find no significant overall effects of this intervention on adult economic self-sufficiency or physical health. Mental health benefits of the voucher offers for adults and for female youth were substantial. Beneficial effects for female youth on education, risky behavior, and physical health were offset by adverse effects for male youth. For outcomes that exhibit significant treatment effects, we find, using variation in treatment intensity across voucher types and cities, that the relationship between neighborhood poverty rate and outcomes is approximately linear.

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Experimental Analysis of Neighborhood Effects

The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment offered randomly selected families housing vouchers to move from high-poverty housing projects to lower-poverty neighborhoods. We analyze MTO’s impacts on children’s long-term outcomes using tax data. We find that moving to a lower-poverty neighborhood when young (before age 13) increases college attendance and earnings and reduces single parenthood rates. Moving as an adolescent has slightly negative impacts, perhaps because of disruption effects. The decline in the gains from moving with the age when children move suggests that the duration of exposure to better environments during childhood is an important determinant of children’s long-term outcomes. (JEL I31, I38, J13, R23, R38)

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The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment

Abiotic stresses (such as metals/metalloids, salinity, ozone, UV-B radiation, extreme temperatures and drought) are among the most challenging threats to agricultural system and economic yield of crop plants. These stresses (in isolation and/or combination) induce numerous adverse effects in plants, impair biochemical/physiological and molecular processes, and eventually cause severe reductions in plant growth, development and overall productivity. Phytohormones have been recognized as a strong tool for sustainably alleviating adverse effects of abiotic stresses in crop plants. The significance of salicylic acid (SA) has been increasingly recognized in improved plant abiotic stress-tolerance via SA-mediated control of major plant-metabolic processes. However, the basic biochemical/physiological and molecular mechanisms that potentially underpin SA-induced plant-tolerance to major abiotic stresses remain least discussed. Based on recent reports, this paper: (a) overviews historical background and biosynthesis of SA under both optimal and stressful environments in plants; (b) critically appraises the role of SA in plants exposed to major abiotic stresses; (c) cross-talks potential mechanisms those are expected to govern SA-induced plant abiotic stress-tolerance; and finally (d) briefly highlights major aspects so far unexplored in the current context.

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Salicylic acid-induced abiotic stress tolerance and underlying mechanisms in plants

ference of 4.61 percentage points (95% confidence interval (CI), −8.54 to −0.69), 3.38 percentage points (95% CI, −6.39 to −0.36), and 4.31 percentage points (95% CI, −7.82 to −0.80), respectively. The differences between the group receiving traditional vouchers and the control group were not significant. CONCLUSIONS The opportunity to move from a neighborhood with a high level of poverty to one with a lower level of poverty was associated with modest but potentially important reductions in the prevalence of extreme obesity and diabetes. The mechanisms under - lying these associations remain unclear but warrant further investigation, given their potential to guide the design of community-level interventions intended to improve health. (Funded by HUD and others.)

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Neighborhoods, Obesity, and Diabetes — A Randomized Social Experiment

The Distribution of Benefits from Public Housing

Are Section 8 housing subsidies too high

A normative theory of transfers

This article uses administrative data on families that participated in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Section 8 Housing Voucher Program between 1995 and 2002 combined with data from other sources to estimate the differences in attrition rates among families with demographic characteristics of greatest interest for housing policy and the effects on attrition of changes in the program’s main parameters. The most important results are that large decreases in the program’s payment standard and increases in the tenant contribution to rent will have small effects on program attrition. These results suggest that the overwhelming majority of voucher recipients receive substantial benefits from program participation. The empirical analysis also indicates that whether the head of the household is elderly and whether the head is disabled are by far the most important influences on the likelihood that the family will exit the tenant-based voucher program. Families with disabled heads of the household are about 37 percent less likely to exit the program and families with elderly heads of the household are about 23 percent less likely to exit the program each year than otherwise similar families. Differences in attrition rates based on other family characteristics are much smaller.

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Edgar O. Olsen

Papers

The Distribution of Benefits from Public Housing

Are Section 8 housing subsidies too high

The Distribution of Benefits from Public Housing

A normative theory of transfers

Explaining Attrition in the Housing Voucher Program