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From Marcy to Madison Square? The Effects of Growing Up in Public Housing on Early Adulthood Outcomes

November 2024

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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 Paper

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  Childhood Housing and Adult Earnings: A Between-Siblings Analysis of Housing Vouchers and Public Housing
  

  January 2013

  Authors: John Haltiwanger, Fredrik Andersson, Daniel Weinberg, Mark J. Kutzbach, Giordano Palloni, Henry O. Pollakowski

  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.
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• Working Paper

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  Creating High-Opportunity Neighborhoods: Evidence from the HOPE VI Program
  

  January 2026

  Authors: Sonya R. Porter, Thomas B. Foster, Raj Chetty, Matthew Staiger, Rebecca Diamond, Lawrence Katz, Laura Tach

  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.
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• Working Paper

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  Divorce, Family Arrangements, and Children's Adult Outcomes
  

  May 2025

  Authors: Maggie R. Jones, Andrew C. Johnston, Nolan G. Pope

  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.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  The Long-Term Effects of Income for At-Risk Infants: Evidence from Supplemental Security Income
  

  March 2024

  Authors: Sarah Miller, Laura Wherry, Gloria G. Aldana, Amelia A. Hawkins, Christopher A. Hollrah, Mitchell D. Wong

  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.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  The Effect of Low-Income Housing on Neighborhood Mobility: Evidence from Linked Micro-Data
  

  May 2016

  Authors: Quentin Brummet, Otávio Bartalotti

  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.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Universal Preschool Lottery Admissions and Its Effects on Long-Run Earnings and Outcomes
  

  March 2023

  Authors: Randall Akee, Leah R. Clark

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-23-09

  We use an admissions lottery to estimate the effect of a universal (non-means tested) preschool program on students' long-run earnings, income, marital status, fertility and geographic mobility. We observe long-run outcomes by linking both admitted and non-admitted individuals to confidential administrative data including tax records. Funding for this preschool program comes from an Indigenous organization, which grants Indigenous students admissions preference and free tuition. We find treated children have between 5 to 6 percent higher earnings as young adults. The results are strongest for individuals from the lower half of the household income distribution in childhood. Likely mechanisms include high-quality teachers and curriculum.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  DOES PARENTS' ACCESS TO FAMILY PLANNING INCREASE CHILDREN'S OPPORTUNITIES? EVIDENCE FROM THE WAR ON POVERTY AND THE EARLY YEARS OF TITLE X
  

  January 2017

  Authors: Martha J. Bailey, Olga Malkova, Zoe M. McLaren

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-17-67

  This paper examines the relationship between parents' access to family planning and the economic resources of their children. Using the county-level introduction of U.S. family planning programs between 1964 and 1973, we find that children born after programs began had 2.8% higher household incomes. They were also 7% less likely to live in poverty and 12% less likely to live in households receiving public assistance. After accounting for selection, the direct effects of family planning programs on parents' incomes account for roughly two thirds of these gains.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Estimating the Impact of the Age of Criminal Majority: Decomposing Multiple Treatments in a Regression Discontinuity Framework
  

  January 2023

  Authors: Caroline Walker, Michael Mueller-Smith, Benjamin Pyle

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-23-01

  This paper studies the impact of adult prosecution on recidivism and employment trajectories for adolescent, first-time felony defendants. We use extensive linked Criminal Justice Administrative Record System and socio-economic data from Wayne County, Michigan (Detroit). Using the discrete age of majority rule and a regression discontinuity design, we find that adult prosecution reduces future criminal charges over 5 years by 0.48 felony cases (? 20%) while also worsening labor market outcomes: 0.76 fewer employers (? 19%) and $674 fewer earnings (? 21%) per year. We develop a novel econometric framework that combines standard regression discontinuity methods with predictive machine learning models to identify mechanism-specific treatment effects that underpin the overall impact of adult prosecution. We leverage these estimates to consider four policy counterfactuals: (1) raising the age of majority, (2) increasing adult dismissals to match the juvenile disposition rates, (3) eliminating adult incarceration, and (4) expanding juvenile record sealing opportunities to teenage adult defendants. All four scenarios generate positive returns for government budgets. When accounting for impacts to defendants as well as victim costs borne by society stemming from increases in recidivism, we find positive social returns for juvenile record sealing expansions and dismissing marginal adult charges; raising the age of majority breaks even. Eliminating prison for first-time adult felony defendants, however, increases net social costs. Policymakers may still find this attractive if they are willing to value beneficiaries (taxpayers and defendants) slightly higher (124%) than potential victims.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Where to Build Affordable Housing? Evaluating the Tradeoffs of Location
  

  December 2023

  Authors: Ariel J. Binder, Cody Cook, Pearl Z. Li

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-23-62R

  How does the location of affordable housing affect tenant welfare, the distribution of assistance, and broader societal objectives such as racial integration? Using administrative data on tenants of units funded by the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), we first show that characteristics such as race and proxies for need vary widely across neighborhoods. Despite fixed eligibility requirements, LIHTC developments in more opportunity-rich neighborhoods house tenants who are higher income, more educated, and far less likely to be Black. To quantify the welfare implications, we build a residential choice model in which households choose from both market-rate and affordable housing options, where the latter must be rationed. While building affordable housing in higher-opportunity neighborhoods costs more, it also increases household welfare and reduces city-wide segregation. The gains in household welfare, however, accrue to more moderate-need, non-Black/Hispanic households at the expense of other households. This change in the distribution of assistance is primarily due to a 'crowding out' effect: households that only apply for assistance in higher-opportunity neighborhoods crowd out those willing to apply regardless of location. Finally, other policy levers'such as lowering the income limits used for means-testing'have only limited effects relative to the choice of location.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  The Children of HOPE VI Demolitions: National Evidence on Labor Market Outcomes
  

  November 2020

  Authors: John Haltiwanger, Daniel Weinberg, Mark J. Kutzbach, Giordano Palloni, Henry O. Pollakowski, Matthew Staiger

  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.
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