Although social housing is prevalent in many developed countries, there is no consensus over how to design allocation rules. Measuring the impact of a change in rules requires predicting how applicants will respond. In a context where rents are fixed, application data scarce, and allocation rules lack transparency, disentangling an applicant preferences from their probability to receive an offer is challenging. This paper develops a dynamic framework which makes use of a novel, comprehensive dataset of French social housing applications to separately identify preferences of applicants to social housing from their expectations over future offers and the allocation rules. This allows to compare the welfare impact of changes in the allocation rules. Results indicate that the current system favors households with French nationality, and disadvantages precarious households like single mothers compared to the rest of the population. Counterfactual analysis suggests removing the dependence of allocation rules on waiting time would improve welfare.
We investigate when affirmative action quotas in centralized school admissions reduce socioeconomic segregation, focusing on Pre-K enrollment in Chile. Chile's 2016 reform introduced centralized assignment with a 15% quota reserving seats for low-SES students. Using difference-in-differences and the reform's staggered regional rollout, we show it had no effect on Pre-K segregation or on low-SES access to high-value-added schools. Since all reform components - centralization, elimination of school selection, and affirmative action - operate in the same direction, this null result implies that affirmative action alone was also ineffective. To understand why, we estimate a structural school choice model using students' rank-ordered lists and replicate the centralized matching algorithm. Counterfactual simulations varying the quota level reveal that quota effectiveness is highly nonlinear: below a critical threshold, quotas do not bind and leave segregation unchanged. Above it, segregation follows a U-shape, minimized when the quota matches the local low-SES population share. The 15% quota fell below this threshold. Municipality-specific quotas calibrated to local demographics achieve the largest segregation reductions.
Do local politicians manipulate the allocation of social housing for electoral gain? In France, where social housing accounts for 18% of the housing stock and mayors exert significant influence over tenant selection, the opacity of the process creates scope for opportunistic behavior. I test for the presence of a local political cycle in social housing assignments around the 2020 French municipal elections using exhaustive administrative data on applications and allocations. My empirical strategy combines an event study that exploits variation in electoral competitiveness across municipalities with a difference-in-differences design that leverages state-administered units - plausibly unaffected by local elections - as a control group. Both approaches indicate no effect of the proximity to an election on the composition of social housing assignees. In contrast, the political leaning of the incumbent mayor is a robust predictor of who receives social housing, indicating that ideology -rather than electoral opportunism - is the primary channel through which local politics shapes allocation decisions.