UCLA

This dissertation contains four essays in housing and immigration economics. The first two chapters are essays on homelessness and homeless housing, and the last two chapters are essays on immigration policy and its impact on the receiving country.

In the first chapter I estimate the causal effect of housing assistance for individuals experiencing homelessness on recidivism to homelessness and economic and social outcomes such as crime, employment, and health. Using a random case worker assignment design and a novel dataset constructed by linking administrative records from multiple public agencies in Los Angeles County, I estimate that housing assistance for single adults experiencing homelessness reduces future recidivism to homelessness by 20 percentage points over an 18-month period, compared to a baseline mean of 40 percent. The decline is driven by housing programs that provide long-term housing solutions and by individuals with physical disabilities and/or severe mental illness. Moreover, my findings suggest that housing assistance reduces crime, increases employment, and improves health, while not increasing reliance on social benefits. A simple cost-benefit analysis implies that up to 80 percent of housing costs are offset by these potential benefits in the first 18 months alone. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that well targeted housing assistance for the homeless with a focus on long-term housing solutions can be rehabilitative for a large segment of the homeless population.

In the second chapter, I investigate the effect of housing sites that serve the homeless population on community-level outcomes such as street homelessness, crime, and property values. I construct a comprehensive data that geocodes the locations of all designated homeless housing sites in Los Angeles County. Using spatial and time variation in homeless housing sites, I estimate the exposure of a community to designated homeless housing sites over time and use changes in this exposure to recover the causal relationship. I find that communities that had an increase in homeless housing in their boundaries and vicinity experience a sizable decline in homeless encampments, overall crime, and homeless-related crimes, and that housing values in these communities had increased.

In the third chapter (written with Ran Abramitzky, Philipp Ager, Leah Platt Boustan, and Casper Worm Hansen), we study the implications of an immigration policy in the 1920s, where the United States substantially reduced immigrant entry by imposing country-specific quotas. We compare local labor markets differentially exposed to the quotas due to variation in the national-origin mix of their immigrant population. US-born workers in more exposed areas did not benefit from the immigrant losses and even experienced occupational downgrading. Instead, local economies substituted toward other sources of labor and capital. In urban areas, immigrants were replaced with internal migrants and immigrants from quota-free countries. By contrast, farmers shifted toward capital-intensive agriculture and the immigrant-intensive mining industry contracted, highlighting the unintended consequences of the border closure.

Finally, In the fourth chapter I study the impact of skilled immigration on innovation in the receiving country, measured by patenting rates. The setting of the study is the first-half of the 20th century in the US, a period characterized by mass migration from Europe to the US and rapid technological progress. Exploiting national immigration policy changes together with historical settlement patterns of immigrants' across US counties, I estimate the effect of skilled immigration on local patenting rates. I find that counties that received more skilled immigrants had no impact on total patenting rates, but that this null effect masks a positive effect on the growing electrical and chemical fields and a negative effect on the traditional mechanical and textiles fields. Furthermore, I find that most of the effect is due to skilled immigration from Non-English Speaking Countries and from Countries with long patenting traditions. I offer a mechanism by which skilled immigrants act as ``Transmitters of Knowledge," that is, they impact innovation primarily by introducing new knowledge that did not exist in their destination prior to their arrival.