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Working Paper
The Effect of Housing First Programs on Future Homelessness and Socioeconomic Outcomes
Housing First programs provide housing assistance without preconditions for homeless individuals as a platform for rehabilitation. Despite the programs’ increasing popularity, limited evidence exists on their effects on socioeconomic outcomes. Using a novel dataset combining administrative records from multiple public agencies in Los Angeles County and a random case manager assignment design, I estimate that Housing First assistance reduces homelessness and crime, increases income and employment, and does not have a detectable effect on healthcare utilization. Cost-benefit analysis implies ...
Working Paper
Should the government sell you goods? Evidence from the milk market in Mexico
Governments spend considerable resources providing goods directly. We show that such behavior may increase welfare when private suppliers have market power. We do this by studying the staggered rollout of hundreds of government milk “ration stores” in Mexico using a proprietary panel of household food purchases. The rollout lowered the price per liter of privately supplied milk by 2.4% and increased household consumption. To compare directprovision with budget-neutral alternatives, we develop and estimate an equilibrium model of the market that accounts for quality differences. Direct ...
Working Paper
The Effect of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Medicaid Expansions on Financial Wellbeing
We examine the effect of the Medicaid expansions under the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) on consumer, financial outcomes using data from a major credit reporting agency for a large, national sample of adults. We employ the synthetic control method to compare individuals living in states that expanded Medicaid to those that did not. We find that the Medicaid expansions significantly reduced the number of unpaid bills and the amount of debt sent to third-party collection agencies among those residing in zip codes with the highest share of low-income, uninsured ...
Working Paper
Private Takings
This paper examines the implications associated with a recent Supreme Court ruling, Kelo v. City of New London. Kelo can be interpreted as supporting eminent domain as a means of transferring property rights from one set of private agents ? landowners ? to another private agent ? a developer. Under voluntary exchange, where the developer sequentially acquires property rights from landowners via bargaining, a holdout problem arises. Eminent domain gives all of the bargaining power to the developer and, as a result, eliminates the holdout problem. This is the benefit of Kelo. However, ...