Essays in Unemployment Insurance and Housing

This dissertation seeks to better understand poverty in the United States. The first two chapters examine the impacts of receiving unemployment insurance (UI) on low-wage, recently displaced workers. The third chapter documents earnings growth and migration across neighborhoods, focusing on high-poverty neighborhoods. Housing is a common theme throughout the dissertation. The first chapter suggests that reducing housing insecurity may be a mechanism by which UI reduces crime, the second chapter explores how UI may prevent homelessness, and the third chapter examines individuals' neighborhood choices that vary with earnings and over the life cycle.

The first chapter examines the impact of UI on subsequent criminal justice system involvement using linked UI and jail administrative data. I estimate this effect using a regression discontinuity design that exploits the minimum earnings requirements for UI. I provide evidence indicating that being barely eligible for UI decreases arrest probability. Most of this overall reduction is driven by reducing assault arrests. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that this crime reduction generates large public benefits approximately equal to the fiscal cost of loosening monetary eligibility requirements.

The second chapter, joint work with Robert Collinson, examines the impact of UI on extreme material distress, particularly stays in New York City homeless shelters. We estimate the impact of UI eligibility on homelessness using a regression discontinuity design (RDD) that exploits a cutoff based on workers' highest quarterly earnings in the past year. We find that UI eligibility reduces homelessness. Not accounting for how UI prevents extreme distress undervalues the benefits of UI.

The third chapter, joint work with coauthors, uses administrative data to document a high degree of migration across neighborhoods and neighborhood types defined in terms of poverty rate and median income. Neighborhood quality increases over an individual's life cycle, and people also move to better neighborhoods in response to earnings improvements. Poor neighborhoods tend to remain poor because of a dynamic process in which initial residents experience high earnings growth but disproportionately out-migrate when earnings improve, contrasting with a pure ``poverty trap” understanding of persistent concentrated poverty.