This paper studies one of the largest spatially targeted redevelopment efforts implemented in the United States: public housing demolitions sponsored by the HOPE VI program. Focusing on Chicago, we study welfare and racial disparities in the impacts of demolitions using a structural model that...

More than two million U.S. households have an eviction case filed against them each year. Policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels are increasingly pursuing policies to reduce the number of evictions, citing harm to tenants and high public expenditures related to homelessness. We...

The population of the United States, as with the rest of the world, is aging rapidly, with the most rapid growth occurring among the age 85 and older population, those who rely most on long-term care. In this chapter, we review the delivery and financing of long-term care in the U.S. We show...

Efforts to document long-term trends in socioeconomic mobility in the United States have been hindered by the lack of large, representative datasets that include information linking parents to their adult children. This problem has been especially acute for women, who are more difficult to link...

Disease spread is in part a function of individual behavior. We examine the factors predicting individual behavior during the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States using novel data collected by Belot et al. (2020). Among other factors, we show that people with lower income, less flexible work...

Wealth varies considerably across the population and changes significantly over the lifecycle. In this paper, we trace out trajectories of wealth across several key life milestones, including marriage, homeownership, childbirth, divorce, disability, health shocks, retirement and widowhood using...

This paper uses monthly zip code-level data on electricity disconnections to document the socioeconomic correlates of extreme economic distress among 5 million customers in Illinois. In 2018-2019, customers in Black and Hispanic zip codes were about 4 times more likely to be disconnected for...

Using every major nationally-representative dataset on parental and non-parental care provided to children up to age 6, we quantify differences in American children's care experiences by socioeconomic status (SES), proxied primarily with maternal education. Increasingly, higher-SES children...

We examine the effects of an unconditional cash transfer on the economic wellbeing (material hardship, ability to meet needs, money on hand, use of friends and family for assistance, and employment) of families and children with very low incomes. We use a parameterized difference-in-differences...

We study how pre-pandemic inequalities in America influenced social distancing over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Richer counties tended to see more protective mobility responses in the initial (pre-pharmaceutical) phase, but less protective responses later. Near linearity of this income...