THE EFFECTS OF ASSISTED HOUSING ON RESIDENTS’ LIFE CHANCES: PSID -ASSISTED HOUSING ADDRESS MATCH UPDATE AND INITIAL ANALYSIS
Project: THE EFFECTS OF ASSISTED HOUSING ON RESIDENTS’ LIFE CHANCES: PSID-ASSISTED HOUSING ADDRESS MATCH UPDATE AND INITIAL ANALYSIS
Sponsor: Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and Annie E. Casey Foundation
IPS Staff: Sandra Newman, Scott Holupka, Amy Robie, and Laura Vernon-Russell
Purpose and Approach
A central social policy concern is how to improve the life chances of low-income children. Research suggests that improving young children’s human capital, such as their cognitive ability, behavior, and health, may produce long-term benefits, including greater educational attainment, greater attachment to the labor force, and higher earnings. One key question driving our research program is whether living in assisted housing has important effects on the development of human capital in children and on a range of self-sufficiency outcomes in adulthood.
In previous research, we matched addresses of all sample households in a major national longitudinal survey, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, to all assisted housing unit addresses in the nation, the-reby creating the Panel Study of Income Dynamics-Assisted Housing Database (PSID-AHD). This ad-dress match covers the period 1968-1995. In this new project, we are updating this address match through 2005 and conducting initial analyses with this updated PSID-AHD. Our analyses of the 1968-1995 database suggests that living in public housing as a child (primarily during the 1970s and early 1980s) was associated with increased employment rates and earning, and reduced welfare dependence in early adulthood. We also found that adults in public housing and privately-owned assisted housing had similar work hours and earnings to comparable adults not living in these subsidized housing envi-ronments, though the rate of decline in welfare receipt among assisted housing residents was slower than among non-housing assistance recipients. (A peer-reviewed paper on this topic was published in the spring, as noted below.) Similar analyses will be replicated with the updated database.
Results
We assembled more than 12 million assisted-housing addresses, which resulted in about 11 million after cleaning and geo-coding to match to the PSID sample. This produced 4,243 address matches at the most fine-grain level. Another 1,531 addresses matched at a more coarse level and will be reviewed clerically.
Publications
Newman, S., S. Holupka and J. Harkness (2009). “The Long-Term Effects of Assisted Housing on Work and Welfare,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 81-101.
