National Bureau of Economic Research

Growing up in racially and economically segregated neighborhoods can have long-lasting effects. In 1966, Black families in Chicago sued the public housing authority over housing policies that segregated Black families. In response, the Chicago Housing Authority created a voucher program that would assist these families in moving to middle-income neighborhoods. Initially, families were relocated to predominantly White neighborhoods. After experiencing difficulty finding enough White neighborhoods willing to accept Black residents, program administrators began to relocate families to revitalizing Black neighborhoods as well.

In The Long-Run Effects of America’s Largest Residential Racial Desegregation Program: Gautreaux (NBER Working Paper 33427), Eric Chyn, Robert Collinson, and Danielle H. Sandler compare...

Over sixty years ago in 1964, the launch of the War on Poverty represented one of the largest and most comprehensive attempts to improve wellbeing in US history. President Lyndon Johnson’s administration invested billions of dollars in American education, health, employment, and community development. Many of these programs targeted the roots of poverty, seeking to provide a “hand up, not a handout.” Johnson aimed “not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.”

My research with collaborators digs deeper into the workings of specific War on Poverty programs, seeking evidence about their effects on generational poverty and economic mobility. Our long-run perspective takes advantage of newly available data. Large-scale data…

Naloxone, which reverses the effects of an opioid overdose, is a critical tool for responding to the opioid crisis. However, prior to the 2010s, two barriers hindered its widespread distribution and use in the United States. One was legal access: Naloxone required a prescription from a healthcare provider. Another was that naloxone was administered by injection and therefore required training for proper use. 

In 2010, Illinois became the first state to adopt a dispensing naloxone access law (NAL) that permitted individuals to obtain naloxone directly from pharmacists, eliminating the need for an individual prescription. By 2015, another 35 states had implemented dispensing NALs. These policy initiatives were complemented by the introduction of Narcan, the first FDA-approved naloxone nasal spray, in 2016. This new…

Immigrants to the US are more entrepreneurial than the native population and overrepresented among high-growth startups and venture-backed tech firms. In Immigrant Entrepreneurship: New Estimates and a Research Agenda (NBER Working Paper 32400), Saheel Chodavadia, Sari Pekkala Kerr, William Kerr, and Louis Maiden use business surveys and administrative employment records to provide new evidence on the prevalence and predictors of immigrant...