Childhood Housing and Adult Earnings : A Between-Siblings Analysis of Housing Vouchers and Public Housing

We create a national-level longitudinal data set to analyze how children's participation in public and voucher-assisted housing affects age 26 earnings and adult incarceration. Naïve OLS estimates suggest that returns to subsidized housing participation are negative, but that relationship is driven by household selection into assisted housing. Household fixed-effects estimates indicate that additional years of public housing and voucher-assisted housing increase adult earnings by 4.9% and 4.7% for females and 5.1% and 2.6% for males, respectively. Childhood participation in assisted housing also reduces the likelihood of adult incarceration for males and females from all household race/ethnicity groups