Housing Behavior and the Experimental Housing Allowance Program: What Have We Learned?

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the Experimental Housing Allowance Program (EHAP). My focus is on what the experimental data have taught us that could not have been learned from more traditional sources of information. I review the major problems that confronted investigators using non-experimental data, and for each problem discuss whether or not it was mitigated by the availability of EHAP data .I conclude that if the goal was to obtain improved estimates of the behavioral response to housing allowances, a social experiment was not necessary.