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The Effects of Eviction on Children

May 2025

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The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'The Effects of Eviction on Children' are listed below in order of similarity.

• Working Paper

  🔥

  
  
  Eviction and Poverty in American Cities
  

  July 2023

  Authors: Davin Reed, Daniel Tannenbaum, Robert Collinson, John Eric Humphries, Nicholas Mader, Winnie van Dijk

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-23-37

  More than two million U.S. households have an eviction case filed against them each year. Policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels are increasingly pursuing policies to reduce the number of evictions, citing harm to tenants and high public expenditures related to homelessness. We study the consequences of eviction for tenants using newly linked administrative data from two major urban areas: Cook County (which includes Chicago) and New York City. We document that prior to housing court, tenants experience declines in earnings and employment and increases in financial distress and hospital visits. These pre-trends pose a challenge for disentangling correlation and causation. To address this problem, we use an instrumental variables approach based on cases randomly assigned to judges of varying leniency. We find that an eviction order increases homelessness and hospital visits and reduces earnings, durable goods consumption, and access to credit in the first two years. Effects on housing and labor market outcomes are driven by impacts for female and Black tenants. In the longer-run, eviction increases indebtedness and reduces credit scores.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  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 Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility
  

  September 2018

  Authors: Maggie R. Jones, Sonya R. Porter, Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, John N. Friedman

  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.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Changing Opportunity: Sociological Mechanisms Underlying Growing Class Gaps and Shrinking Race Gaps in Economic Mobility
  

  July 2024

  Authors: Sonya R. Porter, Raj Chetty, Benjamin Goldman, Will Dobbie, Crystal S. Yang

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-24-38

  We show that intergenerational mobility changed rapidly by race and class in recent decades and use these trends to study the causal mechanisms underlying changes in economic mobility. For white children in the U.S. born between 1978 and 1992, earnings increased for children from high-income families but decreased for children from low-income families, increasing earnings gaps by parental income ('class') by 30%. Earnings increased for Black children at all parental income levels, reducing white- Black earnings gaps for children from low-income families by 30%. Class gaps grew and race gaps shrank similarly for non-monetary outcomes such as educational attainment, standardized test scores, and mortality rates. Using a quasi-experimental design, we show that the divergent trends in economic mobility were caused by differential changes in childhood environments, as proxied by parental employment rates, within local communities defined by race, class, and childhood county. Outcomes improve across birth cohorts for children who grow up in communities with increasing parental employment rates, with larger effects for children who move to such communities at younger ages. Children's outcomes are most strongly related to the parental employment rates of peers they are more likely to interact with, such as those in their own birth cohort, suggesting that the relationship between children's outcomes and parental employment rates is mediated by social interaction. Our findings imply that community-level changes in one generation can propagate to the next generation and thereby generate rapid changes in economic mobility.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Neighborhood Revitalization and Residential Sorting
  

  March 2024

  Authors: Giordano Palloni, John Voorheis, Matthew Staiger

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-24-12

  The HOPE VI Revitalization program sought to transform high-poverty neighborhoods into mixed-income communities through the demolition of public housing projects and the construction of new housing. We use longitudinal administrative data to investigate how the program affected both neighborhoods and individual residential outcomes. In line with the stated objectives, we find that the program reduced poverty rates in targeted neighborhoods and enabled subsidized renters to live in lower-poverty neighborhoods, on average. The primary beneficiaries were not the original neighborhood residents, most of whom moved away. Instead, subsidized renters who moved into the neighborhoods after an award experienced the largest reductions in neighborhood poverty. The program reduced the stock of public housing in targeted neighborhoods but expanded access to housing vouchers in other, lower-poverty neighborhoods. Spillover effects on the poverty rates of other neighborhoods were small and dispersed throughout the city. Our estimates imply that cities that revitalized half of their public housing stock reduced the average neighborhood poverty rate among all subsidized renters by 4.1 percentage points.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  School Discipline and Racial Disparities in Early Adulthood
  

  June 2021

  Authors: Sonya R. Porter, Nikolas Pharris-Ciurej, Andrew Penner, Emily Penner, Miles Davison, Evan Rose, Yotam Shem-Tov, Paul Yoo

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-21-14

  Despite interest in the role of school discipline in the creation of racial inequality, previous research has been unable to identify how students who receive suspensions in school differ from unsuspended classmates on key young adult outcomes. We utilize novel data to document the links between high school discipline and important young adult outcomes related to criminal justice contact, social safety net program participation, post-secondary education, and the labor market. We show that the link between school discipline and young adult outcomes tends to be stronger for Black students than for White students, and that inequality in exposure to school discipline accounts for approximately 30 percent of the Black-White disparities in young adult criminal justice outcomes and SNAP receipt.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  The Timing of Teenage Births: Estimating the Effect on High School Graduation and Later Life Outcomes
  

  January 2016

  Authors: Danielle H. Sandler, Lisa Schulkind

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-16-39R

  We examine the long-term outcomes for a population of teenage mothers who give birth to their children around the end of their high school year. We compare the mothers whose high school education was interrupted by childbirth, because the child was born before her expected graduation date to mothers who did not experience the same disruption to their education. We find that mothers who give birth during the school year are seven percent less likely to graduate from high school, are less likely to be married, and have more children than their counterparts who gave birth just a few months later. The labor market outcomes for these two sets of teenage mothers are not statistically different, but with a lower likelihood of marriage and more children, the households of the treated mothers are more likely to fall below the poverty threshold. While differences in educational attainment have narrowed over time, the differences in labor market outcomes and family structure have remained stable.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective
  

  September 2018

  Authors: Maggie R. Jones, Sonya R. Porter, Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren

  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.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  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

  
  
  Every Breath You Take, Every Dollar You'll Make: The Long-Term Consequences of the Clean Air Act of 1970
  

  September 2013

  Authors: Reed Walker, Adam Isen, Maya Rossin-Slater

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-13-52

  This paper examines the long-term impacts of in-utero and early childhood exposure to ambient air pollution on adult labor market outcomes. We take advantage of a new administrative data set that is uniquely suited for addressing this question because it combines information on individuals' quarterly earnings together with their counties and dates of birth. We use the sharp changes in ambient air pollution concentrations driven by the implementation of the 1970 Clean Air Act Amendments as a source of identifying variation, and we compare cohorts born in counties that experienced large changes in total suspended particulate (TSP) exposure to cohorts born in counties that had minimal or no changes. We nd a signi cant relationship between TSP exposure in the year of birth and adult labor market outcomes. A 10 unit decrease in TSP in the year of birth is associated with a 1 percent increase in annual earnings for workers aged 29-31. Most, but not all, of this effect is driven by an increase in labor force participation. In present value, the gains from being born into a county affected by the 1970 Clean Air Act amount to about $4,300 in lifetime income for the 1.5 million individuals born into these counties each year.
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