Code for: The Effect of Emergency Financial Assistance on Mobility, SNAP Receipt, and Presence of Dependents

This paper studies whether emergency financial assistance for people at risk of homelessness affects outcomes observable in federal tax and census data. We use an established quasi-experimental research design, based on variation in referral to financial assistance at a call center in Chicago that is as-good-as random, conditional on observables. For a prior paper, we linked the call center sample to US Census/IRS records to study employment and earnings. In this paper, we leverage the same data to examine new outcomes: address histories, number of children claimed, and receipt of food benefits (SNAP) in Illinois. We find no evidence that referral to financial assistance affects residential moves, either local or long-distance, or household composition. We do however observe a small increase in SNAP uptake among the lowest-income callers.<br><br>This repository includes all code used to produce the results in the paper. Access to the data is restricted and is not included in this package.<br>