We define educational access as the component of a neighborhood's value that is determined by the set of schools available to its residents. This paper studies the extent to which educational access is determined by sorting based on heterogeneous preferences over school attributes, or local institutions that constrain residential location and…

Moving can be a stressful and disruptive event for children, but the associations among the type of move, accompanying neighborhood characteristics, and children's development are less well understood, particularly for elementary school children. In the current dissertation, I developed and tested components of a conceptual model that uses…

This report examines the ways in which zoning laws affect housing and schooling opportunities in the Buffalo region. It begins with an examination of two communities--the Martin Luther King Park neighborhood in Buffalo and the suburban Village of East Aurora. In addition to the two Buffalo communities where discriminatory zoning has caused extreme…

One in seven people of working age in England live in social housing. Partly because of how the limited supply of social housing is allocated, tenants are more diverse than the population as a whole and more likely to live in relative poverty. Strategies to tackle the big workforce, growth, cost of living and inequality challenges the country…

The COVID-19 pandemic not only affected the health of millions of people across the country, but the accompanying disruption to economic life had impacts on the financial wellbeing of many households. This has been compounded by an ensuing cost of living crisis, with energy bills and food prices rising rapidly. This briefing, analysing survey…

Access to Britain's highly-resourced private schools matters because of concerns surrounding social mobility. Using the UK Family Resources Survey, we document a high and mostly stable income concentration of private school access since 1997. Nevertheless, some low-income participation persists. Bursaries are income-progressive but cannot account…

Many policymakers agree that housing and land use reform is a top priority, particularly in New York State, in order to moderate housing prices. But an often-overlooked point is that such reform is also important in order to promote equal educational opportunity. This report proceeds in five parts. The first part takes a deep dive into how two…

The 2022 "KIDS COUNT in Colorado!" report reveals the momentous loss experienced by children and families across the state during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. It illustrates the pandemic's continued, far-reaching effects on Colorado kids--from difficulty accessing health care, child care, early learning opportunities,…

Childhood is an important time for healthy development and learning, and for establishing the foundation blocks of future wellbeing, but it is also a time of vulnerability. While a positive start in life helps children to reach their full potential, a poor start increases the chances of adverse outcomes for the individual, society and possibly…

This brief is the third in a series examining timely topics that are relevant to Black families and children in the United States. It presents recent data on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Black families' access to stable housing in the United States and, at the local level, in Newark, New Jersey. First, it highlights national findings…

We analyzed data from 28,601 students enrolled at nine large, public research-intensive universities who completed the Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) COVID-19 survey. Students from underrepresented and marginalized backgrounds had significantly higher odds of experiencing financial hardships compared to their peers, including…

This study examines the effects of negative equity on children's academic performance, using data on children attending Florida public schools and housing transactions from the State of Florida. Our empirical strategy exploits variation over time in the timing of family moves to Florida in order to account for household sorting into neighborhoods…

High school students' optimism pertaining to future life outcomes, such as having a career they enjoy, owning a home, and having a better life than their parents had, might have been influenced negatively by recent events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which has been particularly stressful for students. Using data from a sample of current high…

Using a longitudinal dataset created through the linkage of the 2006 Indigenous Peoples Survey (IPS; formerly called the Aboriginal Peoples Survey) and the 2016 long-form Census, this study examines childhood factors that are associated with the completion of a high school diploma or equivalency certificate or higher among off-reserve First…

Economically discriminatory zoning policies--which say that people are not welcome in a community unless they can afford a single-family home, sometimes on a large plot of land--run counter to American ideals and yet are pervasive in America. In most U.S. cities, zoning laws prohibit the construction of duplexes, triplexes, quads, and larger…