Human Capital Effects of Anti-Poverty Programs: Evidence from a Randomized Housing Voucher Lottery / Brian Jacob, Max Kapustin, Jens Ludwig.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Jacob, Brian.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Kapustin, Max.

Ludwig, Jens.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w20164.

NBER working paper series no. w20164

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Human Capital Effects of Anti-Poverty Programs

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2014.

Summary:

Whether government transfer programs increase the human capital of low-income children is a question of first-order policy importance. Such policies might help poor children if their parents are credit constrained, and so under-invest in their human capital. But it is also possible that whatever causes parents to have low incomes might also directly influence children's development, in which case transfer programs need not improve poor children's long-term life chances. While several recent influential studies suggest anti-poverty programs have larger human capital effects per dollar spent than do even the best educational interventions, identification is a challenge because most transfer programs are entitlements. We overcome that problem by studying the effects on children of a generous transfer program that is heavily rationed--means-tested housing assistance. We take advantage of a randomized housing voucher lottery in Chicago in 1997, for which 82,607 people applied, and use administrative data on schooling, arrests, and health to track children's outcomes over 14 years. We focus on families living in unsubsidized private housing at baseline, for whom voucher receipt generates large changes in both housing and non-housing consumption. Estimated effects are mostly statistically insignificant and always much smaller than those from recent studies of cash transfers, and are smaller on a per dollar basis than the best educational interventions.

Notes:

Print version record

May 2014.