The Effects of Housing Assistance on Labor Supply: Evidence from a Voucher Lottery

This paper is part of a larger series of studies of housing vouchers in Chicago with Greg Duncan, Michael Johnson, James Rosenbaum and Jeffrey Smith. Generous financial support was provided by the National Consortium on Violence Research, the Northwestern University / University of Chicago Joint Center for Poverty Research, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, a HUD Urban Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship (to Jacob) and a Brookings Institution post-doctoral fellowship sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (to Ludwig). We thank John Baj, Ken Coles, Robert Goerge, Ron Graf, Anjali Gupta, Barry Isaacson, Bong Joo Lee, Lucy Mackey Bilaver, Jennifer O'Neil, Todd Richardson and William Riley for their assistance in obtaining and interpreting the data used in this study. Thanks to Joe Doyle, Susan Dynarski, Amy Finkelstein, Jeffrey Liebman, Erzo Luttmer, Ben Olken, Edgar Olsen, Barbara Schone, seminar participants at the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Chicago Federal Reserve, Harvard, and particularly Jeffrey Kling for helpful comments. Thanks to Dave Kirk, Sarah Rose, Elias Walsh, Wei Ha, Josh Hyman and Thomas Wei for excellent research assistance. Any errors and all opinions are of course our own. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.