Abstract
This paper shows that treatment effects of the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) housing mobility program should not be interpreted as evidence on neighborhood effects. In a standard joint model of potential outcomes and selection into treatment, defining treatment as moving with an MTO voucher generates a model of program effects, while defining treatment as moving to a high-quality neighborhood generates a model of neighborhood effects. I state the assumptions necessary for using the random assignment of vouchers in a housing mobility program as an instrument to identify neighborhood effects. I then show that the literature using program effects to learn about neighborhood effects implicitly imposes dubious versions of these assumptions.
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