A housing voucher used before age 13 added $302,000 to a child's lifetime earnings

In a US government housing experiment that randomly gave some families vouchers to move to lower-poverty neighbourhoods, the move had no measurable economic effect on the parents themselves. But children who moved before age 13 went on to earn far more as adults and attend college more often, while teenagers who moved saw none of that benefit — suggesting a poor neighbourhood's damage works mainly through childhood exposure, not mere contact.

— Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence F. Katz, The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment — American Economic Review, 2016, drawing on a HUD-run randomised experiment, 1994-1998