Abstract
Drawing on a unique data set that links information on all Wisconsin households receiving means-tested benefits with the educational performance of all Wisconsin public school students in these households, we estimate the effect of a family's initial receipt of housing assistance on students’ subsequent achievement outcomes. We estimate these effects using two different comparison groups. Our first comparison group consists of children living in households that receive housing assistance starting four years after our treatment group—we use observations from those students’ pre-receipt years as the basis for the comparison. Our second comparison group consists of low-income students whose families never received housing assistance, but did receive other forms of means-tested benefits, such as SNAP, TANF, or Medicaid. Overall, our results suggest a positive relationship between housing assistance and math achievement, but the magnitude of this relationship is modest and not consistently statistically significant. We provide evidence that this relationship varies by student race and by type of housing assistance—a voucher or public housing. Throughout, we find little evidence of any relationship between housing assistance and student reading scores.
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