Social
Reductions in household poverty and neighborhood moves: a randomized trial of cash transfers to low-income newborn U.S. families Tim Bruckner* Tim Bruckner Abhery Das THeresa Osypuk Katherine Magnuson
Child poverty is pervasive, spatially patterned, and harmful to child development and life chances. Because of racial segregation and structural racism in the housing market, Black and Hispanic children are much more likely to experience both child and neighborhood poverty. The evidence of how to change poverty or neighborhood poverty, however, suffers from bias including reverse causation and strong confounding. This study examines the Baby’s First Years (BFY) randomized trial of unconditional cash transfers to 1,000 low-income families with newborn infants in year 2018, within four US cities. We test whether the BFY treatment, of receiving $333/month (vs. $20/month) for three years, causes families to make opportunity moves to better quality neighborhoods. We use Intent to Treat linear regression models for this test. Secondarily, we explore whether the mother’s health at baseline modifies any effect of the BFY cash transfer on neighborhood opportunity. We find that the BFY treatment precedes a slight (but not statistically detectable) increase in neighborhood opportunity across time, but this increase is lower than that of the control group (p=0.76). On the other hand, we find effect modification by maternal baseline health. For mothers with poor self-rated health at baseline, the BFY cash transfer caused improvements in cumulative neighborhood opportunity, compared to the control group (coef: 11.34, SE=5.66, p=.04). Our results provide rigorous evidence of heterogeneous treatment effects of the cash transfer. An unconditional cash transfer promotes opportunity moves, but only among mothers with poor health at baseline. Explanations for this heterogeneity require subsequent investigation.