Each year Quartz, a digital publication that’s part of Atlantic Media, publishes a list on Economics Research That Shaped Our World. This year include Professor Rodrigo Pinto’s paper on “Noncompliance as a Rational Choice”. This paper finds that growing up in an affluent neighborhood leads to better economic outcomes as an adult.

Nobel prize winner Jim Heckman writes: “Randomized control trials are considered the “gold standard” of economic evaluation research. Yet, many people assigned to treatment status do not comply. Noncompliance compromises simple interpretation of experimental evidence. Using basic economic choice theory, Pinto shows how to enhance the information from experiments. He applies his tools to the analysis of the Moving to Opportunity experiment, which offers low-income families the opportunities to move to better neighborhoods. Pinto shows that, contrary to influential claims based on results from naïve application of experimental methods, there are substantial impacts on neighborhoods of the outcomes of both the adults and children of families. His work greatly bolsters the evidence on the power of place and the ability of policy to reduce inequality within and across generations.”