From Marcy to Madison Square? The Effects of Growing Up in Public Housing on Early Adulthood Outcomes
November 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-67
Abstract
This paper studies the effects of growing up in public housing in New York City on children's long-run outcomes. Using linked administrative data, we exploit variation in the age children move into public housing to estimate the effects of spending an additional year of childhood in public housing on a range of economic and social outcomes in early adulthood. We find that childhood exposure to public housing improves labor market outcomes and reduces participation in federal safety net programs, particularly for children from the most disadvantaged families. Additionally, we find there is some heterogeneity in impacts across public housing developments. Developments located in neighborhoods with relatively fewer renters and higher household incomes are better for children overall. Our estimate of the marginal value of public funds suggests that for every $1 the government spends per child on public housing, children receive $1.40 in benefits, including $2.30 for children from the most disadvantaged families.
Document Tags and Keywords
Keywords
Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative
keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant
keywords.
By analyzing the content of working papers, KeyBERT identifies terms and phrases that capture the essence of the
text, highlighting the most significant topics and trends. This approach not only enhances searchability but
provides connections that go beyond potentially domain-specific author-defined keywords.
:
expenditure,
spending,
budget,
disadvantaged,
welfare,
housing,
residential,
socioeconomic,
poverty,
neighborhood,
saving,
intergenerational,
apartment,
rent,
homeowner,
child
Tags
Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at
several tasks, including entity tagging.
The model is able to label words and phrases by part-of-speech,
including "organizations." By filtering for frequent words and phrases labeled as "organizations", papers are
identified to contain references to specific institutions, datasets, and other organizations.
:
Social Security Administration,
Housing and Urban Development,
Department of Housing and Urban Development,
American Community Survey,
Social Security Number,
Protected Identification Key,
Earned Income Tax Credit,
W-2,
UC Berkeley,
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families,
National Academy of Sciences,
Census Bureau Disclosure Review Board,
Personally Identifiable Information,
Census Household Composition Key,
MTO
Similar Working Papers
Similarity between working papers are determined by an unsupervised neural
network model
know as Doc2Vec.
Doc2Vec is a model that represents entire documents as fixed-length vectors, allowing for the
capture of semantic meaning in a way that relates to the context of words within the document. The model learns to
associate a unique vector with each document while simultaneously learning word vectors, enabling tasks such as
document classification, clustering, and similarity detection by preserving the order and structure of words. The
document vectors are compared using cosine similarity/distance to determine the most similar working papers.
Papers identified with 🔥 are in the top 20% of similarity.
The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'From Marcy to Madison Square? The Effects of Growing Up in Public Housing on Early Adulthood Outcomes' are listed below in order of similarity.
-
Working PaperChildhood Housing and Adult Earnings: A Between-Siblings Analysis of Housing Vouchers and Public Housing🔥
January 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-48RR
To date, research on the long-term effects of childhood participation in voucher-assisted and public housing has been limited by the lack of data and suitable identification strategies. We create a national level longitudinal data set that enables us to analyze how children's housing experiences affect adult earnings and incarceration rates. While naive estimates suggest there are substantial negative consequences to childhood participation in voucher assisted and public housing, this result appears to be driven largely by selection of households into housing assistance programs. To mitigate this source of bias, we employ household fixed-effects specifications that use only within-household (across-sibling) variation for identification. Compared to naive specifications, household fixed-effects estimates for earnings are universally more positive, and they suggest that there are positive and statistically significant benefits from childhood residence in assisted housing on young adult earnings for nearly all demographic groups. Childhood participation in assisted housing also reduces the likelihood of incarceration across all household race/ethnicity groups. Time spent in voucher-assisted or public housing is especially beneficial for females from non-Hispanic Black households, who experience substantial increases in expected earnings and lower incarceration rates.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperCreating High-Opportunity Neighborhoods: Evidence from the HOPE VI Program🔥
January 2026
Working Paper Number:
CES-26-02
We study whether low-economic-mobility neighborhoods can be transformed into high-mobility areas by analyzing the HOPE VI program, which invested $17 billion to revitalize 262 distressed public housing developments. We estimate the program's impacts using a matched difference-in-differences design, comparing outcomes in revitalized developments to observably similar control developments using anonymized tax records. HOPE VI reduced neighborhood poverty rates by attracting higher-income families to revitalized neighborhoods, but had no causal impact on the earnings of adults living in public housing units. Children raised in revitalized public housing units earn more, are more likely to attend college, and are less likely to be incarcerated. Using a movers exposure design and sibling comparisons, we show that these improvements were driven by changes in neighborhoods' causal effects on children's outcomes. The improvements in neighborhood causal effects were driven in large part by changes in social interaction: HOPE VI increased interaction between public housing residents and peers in surrounding neighborhoods and increased earnings more for subgroups with higher-income peers. Many low-income families in the U.S. currently live in neighborhoods that are as socially isolated as the HOPE VI developments were prior to revitalization. We conclude that it is feasible to create high-opportunity neighborhoods and that connecting socially isolated areas to surrounding communities is a cost-effective approach to doing so.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperDivorce, Family Arrangements, and Children's Adult Outcomes🔥
May 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-28
Nearly a third of American children experience parental divorce before adulthood. To understand its consequences, we use linked tax and Census records for over 5 million children to examine how divorce affects family arrangements and children's long-term outcomes. Following divorce, parents move apart, household income falls, parents work longer hours, families move more frequently, and households relocate to poorer neighborhoods with less economic opportunity. This bundle of changes in family circumstances suggests multiple channels through which divorce may affect children's development and outcomes. In the years following divorce, we observe sharp increases in teen births and child mortality. To examine long-run effects on children, we compare siblings with different lengths of exposure to the same divorce. We find that parental divorce reduces children's adult earnings and college residence while increasing incarceration, mortality, and teen births. Changes in household income, neighborhood quality, and parent proximity account for 25 to 60 percent of these divorce effects.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe Long-Term Effects of Income for At-Risk Infants: Evidence from Supplemental Security Income
March 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-10
This paper examines whether a generous cash intervention early in life can "undo" some of the long-term disadvantage associated with poor health at birth. We use new linkages between several large-scale administrative datasets to examine the short-, medium-, and long-term effects of providing low-income families with low birthweight infants support through the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program. This program uses a birthweight cutoff at 1200 grams to determine eligibility. We find that families of infants born just below this cutoff experience a large increase in cash benefits totaling about 27%of family income in the first three years of the infant's life. These cash benefits persist at lower amounts through age 10. Eligible infants also experience a small but statistically significant increase in Medicaid enrollment during childhood. We examine whether this support affects health care use and mortality in infancy, educational performance in high school, post-secondary school attendance and college degree attainment, and earnings, public assistance use, and mortality in young adulthood for all infants born in California to low-income families whose birthweight puts them near the cutoff. We also examine whether these payments had spillover effects onto the older siblings of these infants who may have also benefited from the increase in family resources. Despite the comprehensive nature of this early life intervention, we detect no improvements in any of the study outcomes, nor do we find improvements among the older siblings of these infants. These null effects persist across several subgroups and alternative model specifications, and, for some outcomes, our estimates are precise enough to rule out published estimates of the effect of early life cash transfers in other settings.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility
September 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-42R
We construct a publicly available atlas of children's outcomes in adulthood by Census tract using anonymized longitudinal data covering nearly the entire U.S. population. For each tract, we estimate children's earnings distributions, incarceration rates, and other outcomes in adulthood by parental income, race, and gender. These estimates allow us to trace the roots of outcomes such as poverty and incarceration back to the neighborhoods in which children grew up. We find that children's outcomes vary sharply across nearby tracts: for children of parents at the 25th percentile of the income distribution, the standard deviation of mean household income at age 35 is $4,200 across tracts within counties. We illustrate how these tract-level data can provide insight into how neighborhoods shape the development of human capital and support local economic policy using two applications. First, we show that the estimates permit precise targeting of policies to improve economic opportunity by uncovering specific neighborhoods where certain subgroups of children grow up to have poor outcomes. Neighborhoods matter at a very granular level: conditional on characteristics such as poverty rates in a child's own Census tract, characteristics of tracts that are one mile away have little predictive power for a child's outcomes. Our historical estimates are informative predictors of outcomes even for children growing up today because neighborhood conditions are relatively stable over time. Second, we show that the observational estimates are highly predictive of neighborhoods' causal effects, based on a comparison to data from the Moving to Opportunity experiment and a quasi-experimental research design analyzing movers' outcomes. We then identify high-opportunity neighborhoods that are affordable to low-income families, providing an input into the design of affordable housing policies. Our measures of children's long-term outcomes are only weakly correlated with traditional proxies for local economic success such as rates of job growth, showing that the conditions that create greater upward mobility are not necessarily the same as those that lead to productive labor markets.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperHow Do Neighborhoods and Firms Affect Intergenerational Mobility?
March 2026
Working Paper Number:
CES-26-18
We use data from the Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics linked to the 2000 Census to study intergenerational earnings mobility in the United States. We augment the standard intergenerational transmission model relating children's log earnings to those of their parent with an additional term representing mean log parent earnings in the childhood neighborhood. The between-neighborhood intergenerational relationship is twice as strong as the within-neighborhood relationship, even after adjusting for measurement error in parents' earnings. Moreover, mean earnings of the parents in a neighborhood capture over 80% of the variation in unrestricted neighborhood effects that reflect differences in 'absolute mobility'. Next, we use an AKM framework to decompose parents', children's, and neighboring parents' earnings into person effects and establishment premiums. Children's person effects are mainly influenced by parents' and neighbors' person effects, whereas children's establishment premiums are mainly influenced by parents' and neighbors' establishment premiums. These patterns point to separate channels for human capital and access to jobs in the intergenerational transmission process. Finally, we explore the implications for the Black-white earnings gap. Neighborhoods explain 30% of the Black-white gap in children's earnings conditional on parents' earnings, operating largely through gaps in average person effects. Conditional on neighborhood average earnings, children from neighborhoods with higher Black shares achieve higher adult earnings.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe Children of HOPE VI Demolitions: National Evidence on Labor Market Outcomes
November 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-39
We combine national administrative data on earnings and participation in subsidized housing to study how the demolition of 160 public housing projects'funded by the HOPE VI program'affected the adult labor market outcomes for 18,500 children. Our empirical strategy compares children exposed to the program to children drawn from thousands of non-demolished projects, adjusting for observable differences using a flexible estimator that combines features of matching and regression. We find that children who resided in HOPE VI projects earn 14% more at age 26 relative to children in comparable non-HOPE VI projects. These earnings gains are strongest for demolitions in large cities, particularly in neighborhoods with higher pre-demolition poverty rates and lower pre-demolition job accessibility. There is no evidence that the labor market gains are driven by improvements in household or neighborhood environments that promote human capital development in children. Rather, subsequent improvements in job accessibility represent a likely pathway for the results.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe Effect of Low-Income Housing on Neighborhood Mobility: Evidence from Linked Micro-Data
May 2016
Working Paper Number:
carra-2016-02
While subsidized low-income housing construction provides affordable living conditions for poor households, many observers worry that building low-income housing in poor communities induces individuals to move to poor neighborhoods. We examine this issue using detailed, nationally representative microdata constructed from linked decennial censuses. Our analysis exploits exogenous variation in low-income housing supply induced by program eligibility rules for Low-Income Housing Tax Credits to estimate the effect of subsidized housing on neighborhood mobility patterns. The results indicate little evidence to suggest a causal effect of additional low-income housing construction on the characteristics of neighborhoods to which households move. This result is true for households across the income distribution, and supports the hypothesis that subsidized housing provides affordable living conditions without encouraging households to move to less-affluent neighborhoods than they would have otherwise.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperParental Earnings and Children's Well-Being and Future Success: An Analysis of the SIPP Matched to SSA Earnings Data
April 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-12
We estimate the association between parental earnings and a wide variety of indicators of child well-being using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) matched to administrative earnings records from the Social Security Administration. We find that the use of longer time averages of parent earnings leads to substantially higher estimated effects compared to using only a single year of parent earnings. This suggests that previous studies may have understated the potential efficacy of income support programs to improve child well-being. Further, policy makers should take into account the attenuation bias when comparing studies that use different time spans to measure parental income. Using 7 year time averages of parent earnings, we show for example, that a doubling of parent earnings reduces the probability of a teenager reporting being in poor health by close to 50 percent and a child having insufficient food by 75 percent.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperRace and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective
September 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-40R
We study the sources of racial and ethnic disparities in income using de-identified longitudinal data covering nearly the entire U.S. population from 1989-2015. We document three sets of results. First, the intergenerational persistence of disparities varies substantially across racial groups. For example, Hispanic Americans are moving up significantly in the income distribution across generations because they have relatively high rates of intergenerational income mobility. In contrast, black Americans have substantially lower rates of upward mobility and higher rates of downward mobility than whites, leading to large income disparities that persist across generations. Conditional on parent income, the black-white income gap is driven entirely by large differences in wages and employment rates between black and white men; there are no such differences between black and white women. Second, differences in family characteristics such as parental marital status, education, and wealth explain very little of the black-white income gap conditional on parent income. Differences in ability also do not explain the patterns of intergenerational mobility we document. Third, the black-white gap persists even among boys who grow up in the same neighborhood. Controlling for parental income, black boys have lower incomes in adulthood than white boys in 99% of Census tracts. Both black and white boys have better outcomes in low-poverty areas, but black-white gaps are larger on average for boys who grow up in such neighborhoods. The few areas in which black-white gaps are relatively small tend to be low-poverty neighborhoods with low levels of racial bias among whites and high rates of father presence among blacks. Black males who move to such neighborhoods earlier in childhood earn more and are less likely to be incarcerated. However, fewer than 5% of black children grow up in such environments. These findings suggest that reducing the black-white income gap will require efforts whose impacts cross neighborhood and class lines and increase upward mobility specifically for black men.View Full Paper PDF
