By Carolyn Y. Johnson Globe Staff

In the mid-1990s, thousands of families living in public housing, including nearly 700 adults from some of Boston’s poorest neighborhoods, took part in a federal housing voucher program designed to test whether moving families to a less impoverished place would improve their lives.

The bold social experiment, called Moving to Opportunity , was intended to subject public policy to the same kind of trial that is the gold standard in medicine. Now, a new analysis by a team of top social scientists suggests that while the $80 million program didn’t lift people out of poverty, it had a profound and measurable effect on their happiness.

For every 13-percentage-point decrease in the neighborhood poverty rate, people reported an increase in their well-being equivalent to a $13,000 increase in annual income. That’s the equivalent of a two-thirds increase in the income of the families in the study, the authors calculated.

People who used vouchers to move to neighborhoods with less poverty also experienced improvements in mental health and a strong suggestion of benefits to physical health. Their household incomes did not improve, however.

Surprisingly, the level of racial integration in a neighborhood did not matter nearly as much as the rate of poverty when it came to residents’ happiness.

“The bigger the change in poverty that you got through a move, the bigger the improvement in well-being and health,” said Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard University who has led the long-term evaluation of Moving to Opportunity. “If you stay in a poor neighborhood, but it’s more racially integrated, it doesn’t seem to have big effects. ... Being in a really poor neighborhood has adverse effects, regardless of the racial composition.”