University of Florida Department of Economics Seminar
April 6th 10:30am, Room to be determined
Jesse McCune Gregory, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Jesse Gregory is Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Gainesville native. I invited Jesse to give a talk at the University of Florida and am co-hosting his April 6th seminar in the Department of Economics. He will present a co-authored technical paper examining the general equilibrium consequences of offering housing vouchers to low-income households on children’s achievement and residential location decisions.
Neighborhood Choices, Neighborhood Effects and Housing Vouchers (Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Working Paper 2017-02) by Morris Davis, Jesse Gregory, Daniel Hartley, and Kegon Tan
We study how households choose neighborhoods, how neighborhoods affect child ability, and how housing vouchers influence neighborhood choices and child outcomes. We use two new panel data sets with tract-level detail for Los Angeles county to estimate a dynamic model of optimal tract-level location choice for renting households and, separately, the impact of living in a given tract on child test scores (which we call “child ability” throughout). We simulate optimal location choices and the resulting changes in child ability of the poorest households in our sample under various housing-voucher policies that incentivize households to relocate to tracts that beneficially impact child ability. When vouchers are restricted such that they can only be applied to units in the top 5% of tracts based on tract impact on child ability, we compute an “optimal” voucher amount of $300 per month where the benefits to child ability net of voucher costs are maximized. We also compute a “break-even” voucher amount of $700 per month in which benefits equal to costs.
