A new study is offering a detailed picture of how geographic location affects future income. Researchers at Harvard University’s Equality of Opportunity Project went back to a set of data collected in an experiment from the early 1990s, when the U.S. government gave vouchers to help poor families move to better neighborhoods, and then compared the outcomes with families who stayed where they were.
The inital results showed little benefit. But now, researchers at Harvard have additional data that looks at the earnings of the kids in these families as they grew up. They found that children's locations made for big differences when they became adults, and that each year spent in a particular place cumulatively affected a child’s adult earnings.
Ben Scuderi is one of the researchers with the Equality of Opportunity Project and joined Vermont Edition to talk about the findings.
The New York Times has published the data in an interactive feature where you can drill in to the county-by-county data for Vermont. Read the full Times story here.
