Subsidized Housing and the Transition to Adulthood: A Propensity Score Approach

Yana Kucheva, University of California, Los Angeles

The timing and circumstances of leaving home are an important part of the status attainment process. To the extent that early transitions interfere with investments in education or hasten the assumption of family roles, these patterns can contribute to the intergenerational transmission of poverty and disadvantage. My project is a detailed examination of how children who grew up in subsidized housing make the transition to adulthood. I use the counterfactual approach to causal inference to statistically match children who grew up in subsidized housing to ones who are similar on observable characteristics but did not live in subsidized housing. I find that the effects of subsidized housing vary by the race and gender of the child. By analyzing how government support in childhood interacts with the transitions of children into adulthood, this project sheds light on whether federal policies aimed at supporting poor families hinder the upward mobility of children.