Public Housing, Housing Vouchers and Student Achievement: Evidence from Public Housing Demolitions in Chicago

Brian A. Jacob

No 9652, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: There has been a substantial shift from public housing to voucher-based housing assistance over the past decade, largely in response to the rising cost of public housing and the high rates of crime, unemployment and school failure among public housing residents. Despite this shift, there is relatively little evidence on the impact of public housing or housing vouchers on educational outcomes. This paper utilizes a plausibly exogenous source of variation in housing assistance generated by public housing demolitions in Chicago to examine the impact of high-rise public housing on student outcomes. I find that children in households affected by the demolitions do no better or worse than their peers on a wide variety of achievement measures. Because the majority of households that leave public housing in response to the demolitions move to neighborhoods and schools that closely resemble those they left, the zero effect of the demolitions may be interpreted as the independent impact of public housing. These findings suggest that eliminating high-rise public housing will not necessarily lead to the benefits documented in housing mobility experiments such as Gautreaux or Moving to Opportunity

JEL-codes: H0 H5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pbe and nep-ure
Note: CH ED
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Published as Jacob, Brian A. "Public Housing Vouchers, And Student Achievement: Evidence From Public Housing Demolitions In Chicago," American Economic Review, 2004, v94(1,Mar), 233-258.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w9652.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:9652

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w9652

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().