ESSAYS ON THE EFFECTS OF PUBLIC POLICIES ON HOUSING, EMPLOYMENT, AND INCOME INEQUALITY

Abstract

In this dissertation, I study the impact of public policies on three related but distinct economic outcomes: employment, housing stability, and income inequality. In the second chapter, I examine the employment impact of the Paycheck Protection Program, a key element of the federal government’s fiscal stimulus efforts during the 2020 coronavirus-induced recession. To assess the effect of this support on small business employment, I exploit differential timing in when firms rolled off headcount requirements needed to receive loan forgiveness. I find that as the PPP covered period expired, companies reduced active employment by a statistically significant 0.41% per week and 1.6% in the four weeks post-expiration. I estimate that, in aggregate, 907,200 jobs were lost within the four weeks after firms’ covered periods expired, as companies no longer need to maintain pre-COVID-19 headcount levels to receive PPP loan forgiveness. In the third chapter, I investigate the effectiveness of housing vouchers, the most common form of low-income rental assistance, in preventing households from facing eviction. I examine this question using newly-available public data on the universe of court-ordered evictions in the United States and exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in historical housing voucher allocation. I find that every four to six vouchers prevent one eviction in a given county, and that this effect is greater in counties with higher rent burdens and longer voucher waitlists. A simple back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that, on average, one fourth of the cost of a housing voucher can be recovered through savings in eviction prevention alone. In the final chapter, I conduct an empirical simulation exercise that gauges the plausible impact of increased rates of college attainment on a variety of measures of income inequality and economic insecurity. Using two different methodological approaches—a distributional approach and a causal parameter approach—I find that increased rates of bachelor’s and associate degree attainment would meaningfully increase economic security for lower-income individuals, reduce poverty and near-poverty, and shrink gaps between the 90th and lower percentiles of the earnings distribution. However, increases in college attainment would not significantly reduce inequality at the very top of the distribution.