When a child moves from a high-poverty neighborhood to a safer, better-resourced one, their entire life trajectory can shift: better schools, higher future earnings, improved health. Experiments like Moving to Opportunity have shown this again and again. But these successes raise a much bigger, far more complicated question: what would happen if millions of families — not hundreds — were given the chance to move to opportunity?
That question sits at the center of a new article in the American Economic Review by Diego Daruich, assistant professor of finance and business economics at USC Marshall, and Eric Chyn, associate professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin. Their study, “An Equilibrium Analysis of the Effects of Neighborhood-Based Interventions on Children,” moves beyond what small experiments can tell us to examine what large-scale housing and neighborhood policies would look like in the real world — where families, landlords, housing markets, and local governments all respond simultaneously.
Small-scale experiments are powerful, but they have limits. When only a small number of families move to high-opportunity neighborhoods, rents don’t change much. Schools don’t get overcrowded. Local tax systems barely notice. But the moment a city or nation tries to scale up these policies, everything becomes interconnected. Demand for housing rises. Neighborhoods evolve. Tax burdens shift. And these changes can either magnify the benefits for children or dilute them.
To capture these broader effects, Chyn and Daruich built an economic model that incorporates how parents decide where to live and how much to invest in their children; how inequality evolves across families’ lifetimes; and how governments must raise revenue to fund mobility or place-based programs. Critically, they allow neighborhoods themselves to change in response to policy — something small experiments cannot reveal.
The authors calibrated their model using U.S. data and tested it against real-world evidence from both the Moving to Opportunity experiment and federal place-based programs such as the Empowerment Zone initiative. With this foundation, they simulated what would happen if policymakers substantially expanded rental vouchers or invested heavily in revitalizing disadvantaged neighborhoods.
The results offer clear guidance. Even after accounting for taxation and market adjustments, large-scale housing voucher programs can produce substantial net benefits for society, especially when targeted at families with children. Helping children grow up in better neighborhoods generates sizable long-term gains in earnings and wellbeing that easily outweigh the immediate fiscal costs.
