NYU Furman Center Fall Speaker Series: Eviction and Poverty in American Cities with Winnie van Dijk

Please join the NYU Furman Center for a lunchtime presentation: 

Eviction and Poverty in American Cities

with

Winnie van Dijk

Assistant Professor of Economics, Yale University

Lunch will be served starting at 1:45 pm.
Please note that food is available on a first-come, first-served basis. We ask that you plan to arrive early for lunch so we can start the presentation promptly at 2 p.m.
For those unable to join in-person, there is an option to join remotely.

RSVP to Attend In-Person

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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 pose 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. Read the paper here.

About the Presenter:

Winnie van Dijk is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Yale University. She is an economist whose research uses large, linked data sets to study the causes and consequences of poverty in high-income countries. Professor van Dijk’s work combines frontier econometric methods with the collection and curation of new data sets — including court filings, information collected by public agencies, surveys, and credit reports  — and aims to inform the design and evaluation of economic policies that are relevant to low-income households. Her research includes empirical studies of the causes and consequences of eviction, housing assistance, legal aid, school choice systems, and criminal records, as well as the determinants of representation of low-income households in academic research. van Dijk is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and she is affiliated with Opportunity Insights, the University of Chicago Inclusive Economy Lab, the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities, and the center for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE). She graduated from the University of Chicago with a Ph.D. in economics, and she was a Saieh Family Research Fellow at the Becker Friedman Institute and an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at Harvard. Before obtaining her Ph.D., she studied at the London School of Economics and at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.