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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 Effects of Eviction on Children
May 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-34
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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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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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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The Census Historical Environmental Impacts Frame
October 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-66
The Census Bureau's Environmental Impacts Frame (EIF) is a microdata infrastructure that combines individual-level information on residence, demographics, and economic characteristics with environmental amenities and hazards from 1999 through the present day. To better understand the long-run consequences and intergenerational effects of exposure to a changing environment, we expand the EIF by extending it backward to 1940. The Historical Environmental Impacts Frame (HEIF) combines the Census Bureau's historical administrative data, publicly available 1940 address information from the 1940 Decennial Census, and historical environmental data. This paper discusses the creation of the HEIF as well as the unique challenges that arise with using the Census Bureau's historical administrative data.
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Estimating the Potential Impact of Combined Race and Ethnicity Reporting on Long-Term Earnings Statistics
September 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-48
We use place of birth information from the Social Security Administration linked to earnings data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Program and detailed race and ethnicity data from the 2010 Census to study how long-term earnings differentials vary by place of birth for different self-identified race and ethnicity categories. We focus on foreign-born persons from countries that are heavily Hispanic and from countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). We find substantial heterogeneity of long-term earnings differentials within country of birth, some of which will be difficult to detect when the reporting format changes from the current two-question version to the new single-question version because they depend on self-identifications that place the individual in two distinct categories within the single-question format, specifically, Hispanic and White or Black, and MENA and White or Black. We also study the USA-born children of these same immigrants. Long-term earnings differences for the 2nd generation also vary as a function of self-identified ethnicity and race in ways that changing to the single-question format could affect.
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Changing Opportunity: Sociological Mechanisms Underlying Growing Class Gaps and Shrinking Race Gaps in Economic Mobility
July 2024
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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The Impact of Parental Resources on Human Capital Investment and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from the Great Recession
June 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-34
I study the impact of parents' financial resources during adolescence on postsecondary human capital investment and labor market outcomes, using house value changes during the Great Recession of 2007-2009 as a natural experiment. I use several restricted-access datasets from the U.S. Census Bureau to create a novel dataset that includes intergenerational linkages between children and their parents. This data allows me to exploit house value variation within labor markets, addressing the identification concern that local house values are related to local economic conditions. I find that the average decrease to parents' home values lead to persistent decreases in bachelor's degree attainment of 1.26%, earnings of 1.96%, and full-time employment of 1.32%. Children of parents suffering larger house value shocks are more likely to substitute into two-year degree programs, drop out of college, or be enrolled in a college program in their late 20s.
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Mobility, Opportunity, and Volatility Statistics (MOVS):
Infrastructure Files and Public Use Data
April 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-23
Federal statistical agencies and policymakers have identified a need for integrated systems of household and personal income statistics. This interest marks a recognition that aggregated measures of income, such as GDP or average income growth, tell an incomplete story that may conceal large gaps in well-being between different types of individuals and families. Until recently, longitudinal income data that are rich enough to calculate detailed income statistics and include demographic characteristics, such as race and ethnicity, have not been available. The Mobility, Opportunity, and Volatility Statistics project (MOVS) fills this gap in comprehensive income statistics. Using linked demographic and tax records on the population of U.S. working-age adults, the MOVS project defines households and calculates household income, applying an equivalence scale to create a personal income concept, and then traces the progress of individuals' incomes over time. We then output a set of intermediate statistics by race-ethnicity group, sex, year, base-year state of residence, and base-year income decile. We select the intermediate statistics most useful in developing more complex intragenerational income mobility measures, such as transition matrices, income growth curves, and variance-based volatility statistics. We provide these intermediate statistics as part of a publicly released data tool with downloadable flat files and accompanying documentation. This paper describes the data build process and the output files, including a brief analysis highlighting the structure and content of our main statistics.
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Interpreting Cohort Profiles of Lifecycle Earnings Volatility
April 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-21
We present new estimates of earnings volatility over time and the lifecycle for men and women by race and human capital. Using a long panel of restricted-access administrative Social Security earnings linked to the Current Population Survey, we estimate volatility with both transparent summary measures, as well as decompositions into permanent and transitory components. From the late 1970s to the mid 1990s there is a strong negative trend in earnings volatility for both men and women. We show this is driven by a reduction in transitory variance. Starting in the mid 1990s there is relative stability in trends of male earnings volatility because of an increase in the variance of permanent shocks, especially among workers without a college education, and a more attenuated trend decline among women. Cohort analyses indicate a strong U-shape pattern of volatility over the working life, which comes from large permanent shocks early and later in the lifecycle. However, this U-shape shifted downward and leftward in more recent cohorts, the latter from the fanning out of lifecycle transitory volatility in younger cohorts. These patterns are more pronounced among White men and women compared to Black workers.
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