Employment Access and Employment Outcomes for Movers in the Housing Choice Voucher Program

• In Event: Employment and Financial Outcomes of Participants in Rental Assistance Programs

Abstract

This study examines the impact of spatial access to employment opportunities on low-income households by examining the labor-force participation outcomes of households that move within the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program – the largest source of rental assistance for low-income households in the United States. In addition to providing financial assistance, these subsidies potentially enable recipients to move to neighborhoods with greater access to employment opportunities. Focusing on households that moved within the HCV program between 2005 and 2018, this study uses a two-stage modeling framework controlling for neighborhood selection to explore the direct impact of neighborhood employment access on labor-force participation. In addition to employing a novel methodological framework, this analysis also expands upon existing studies by considering multiple discrete measures of employment access: overall access to employment as well as access specifically to low-wage employment and to jobs occupied by workers without a high school diploma. Model results reveal important differences: while voucher recipients do not experience substantive improvements in employment outcomes after moving to neighborhoods with high levels of access to employment overall, they experience gains in labor-force participation after moving specific to neighborhoods with greater access to low-wage employment opportunities. These results point to the importance of labor market segmentation in shaping labor market outcomes for housing subsidy recipients and suggest that enabling greater access to low-wage employment opportunities for low-income households has the potential to generate improved labor-market outcomes for voucher recipients.

Author

• Alex Ramiller, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author