EVICTION AND POVERTY IN AMERICAN CITIES

More than two million U.S. households have an eviction case filed against them each year. Policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels are increasingly pursuing policies to reduce the number of evictions, citing harm to tenants and high public expenditures related to homelessness. We study the consequences of eviction for tenants using newly linked administrative data from two large cities. We document that prior to housing court, tenants experience declines in earnings and employment and increases in financial distress and hospital visits. These pre-trends are more pronounced for tenants who are evicted, which poses a challenge for disentangling correlation and causation. To address this problem, we use an instrumental variables approach based on cases randomly assigned to judges of varying leniency. We find that an eviction order increases homelessness, and reduces earnings, durable consumption, and access to credit. Effects on housing and labor market outcomes are driven by impacts for female and Black tenants. Robert Collinson University of Notre Dame Economics Department Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities 3060 Jenkins Nanovic Hall Notre Dame, INDI 46556 United States rcollin8@nd.edu John Eric Humphries Department of Economics Yale University 37 Hillhouse Ave New Haven, CT 06511 and NBER johneric.humphries@yale.edu Nicholas S. Mader Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago 313 E 60th St Chicago, IL 60637 nmader@chapinhall.org Philadelphia, PA 19106 davin.reed@phil.frb.org Daniel I. Tannenbaum Department of Economics University of Nebraska – Lincoln HLH 525 B P.O. Box 880489 Lincoln, NE 68588 dtannenbaum@unl.edu Winnie L. van Dijk Department of Economics Harvard University Littauer Center 1805 Cambridge Street Cambridge, MA 02138 and NBER winnie_vandijk@fas.harvard.edu An appendix is available at http://www.nber.org/data-appendix/w26139