Working Papers

"Housing Assistance and Children's Human Capital: Evidence from Connecticut"

January 2026. [Draft available upon request]

Abstract: This paper studies how housing vouchers and public housing affect human capital development and early-adult outcomes among children. To identify causal impacts, I rely on variation in childhood exposure to public housing and housing vouchers arising from waiting lists ordered by lottery. I measure individual educational outcomes by constructing a new administrative dataset linking applications to housing assistance waiting lists to K-12 and postsecondary education records in Connecticut. Despite the generosity of these transfer programs, I find no evidence that exposure to public housing or housing vouchers leads to improvements in a wide range of child educational outcomes spanning from kindergarten to college. I rationalize these results with evidence on how these transfers affect proxies for adult investments in children (labor supply) and the productivity of these investments (school quality).

"Where Does the Tide Roll? The Causes and Consequences of Out-of-State Enrollment at Public Flagships" 

with Ryan Haygood, January 2026. [Draft available upon request]

Abstract: Between 2000 and 2021, the average share of out-of-state enrollment among first-year students at US public flagship universities rose by 41%. Using a combination of novel data sources at institution, municipality, and individual levels, we present evidence that this rise in non-resident enrollment is driven by university recruitment efforts and concentrated among out-of-state students from households in high-income locations. After linking twenty years of commencement records from a large public flagship to graduate work histories, we exploit plausibly exogenous across-cohort variation in state-level enrollment shares to show that each 1 percentage point increase in out-of-state enrollment increases in-state students’ out-migration by 0.24-0.28 percentage points. Despite this spillover effect on student migration, we find that out-of-state students more than pay for themselves through higher tuition revenues and an increased probability of residing in the college-going state: our preferred estimate is that a marginal out-of-state student delivers a lifetime budget surplus of more than $36k.

Media: [AL.com]