Eviction may be an important channel for the intergenerational transmission of poverty, and concerns about its effects on children are often raised as a rationale for tenant protection policies. We study how eviction impacts children's home environment, school engagement, educational achievement, and high school completion by assembling new data sets linking eviction court records in Chicago and New York to administrative public school records and restricted Census records. To disentangle the consequences of eviction from the effects of correlated sources of economic distress, we use a research design based on the random assignment of court cases to judges who vary in their leniency. We find that eviction increases children's residential mobility, homelessness, and likelihood of doubling up with grandparents or other adults. Eviction also disrupts school engagement, causing increased absences and school changes. While we find little impact on elementary and middle school test scores, eviction substantially reduces high school course credits. Lastly, we find that eviction reduces high school graduation and use a novel bounding method to show that this finding is not driven by differential attrition. The disruptive effects of eviction appear worse for older children and boys. Our evidence suggests that the impact of eviction on children runs through the disruption to the home environment or school engagement rather than deterioration in school or neighborhood quality, and may be moderated by access to family support networks.
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Eviction and Poverty in American Cities
July 2023
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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School Discipline and Racial Disparities in Early Adulthood
June 2021
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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Divorce, 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.
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Childhood 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.
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The 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.
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Consequences of Eviction for Parenting and Non-parenting College Students
June 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-35
Amidst rising and increasingly unaffordable rents, 7.6 million people are threatened with eviction each year across the United States'and eviction rates are twice as high for renters with children. One important and neglected population who may experience unique levels of housing insecurity is college students, especially given that one in five college students are parents. In this study, we link 11.9 million student records to eviction filings from housing courts, demographic characteristics reported in decennial census and survey data, incomes reported on tax returns by students and their parents, and dates of birth and death from the Social Security Administration. Parenting students are more likely than non-parenting students to identify as female (62.81% vs. 55.94%) and Black (19.66% vs. 14.30%), be over 30 years old (42.73% vs. 20.25%), and have parents with lower household incomes ($100,000 vs. $140,000). Parenting students threatened with eviction (i.e., had an eviction filed against them) are much more likely than non-threatened parenting students to identify as female (81.18% vs. 62.81%) and Black (56.84% vs. 19.66%). In models adjusted for individual and institutional characteristics, we find that being threatened with an eviction was significantly associated with reduced likelihood of degree completion, reduced post-enrollment income, reduced likelihood of being married post-enrollment, and increased post-enrollment mortality. Among parenting students, 38.38% (95% confidence interval (CI): 32.50-44.26%) of non-threatened students completed a bachelor's degree compared to just 15.36% (CI: 11.61-19.11%) of students threatened with eviction. Our findings highlight the long-term economic and health impacts of housing insecurity during college, especially for parenting students. Housing stability for parenting students may have substantial multigenerational benefits for economic mobility and population health.
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The Timing of Teenage Births: Estimating the Effect on High School Graduation and Later Life Outcomes
January 2016
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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Race 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.
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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
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.
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Virtual Charter Students Have Worse Labor Market Outcomes as Young Adults
June 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-32
Virtual charter schools are increasingly popular, yet there is no research on the long-term outcomes of virtual charter students. We link statewide education records from Oregon with earnings information from IRS records housed at the U.S. Census Bureau to provide evidence on how virtual charter students fare as young adults. Virtual charter students have substantially worse high school graduation rates, college enrollment rates, bachelor's degree attainment, employment rates, and earnings than students in traditional public schools. Although there is growing demand for virtual charter schools, our results suggest that students who enroll in virtual charters may face negative long-term consequences.
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