The Effects of Emergency Rental Assistance During the Pandemic: Evidence from Four Cities

We thank Blanca Garcia, Emily Davis, Will Day, Kenny Hofmeister, Jacqueline Kelley-Cogdell, Ayush Sinha, Stephen Stapleton, Peter Williams, and Seth Zissette for excellent research assistance. DeFusco gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation Pandemic Response Policy Research Fund. Collinson, Phillips, and Turner acknowledge support from the Wilson-Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO). J-PAL North America and LEO provided financial support for surveys. Special thanks to King County employees Jeremey Breicher-Haimson, Christina McHugh, Emily Reimal, and Jesse Warren for lending expertise on both data and policy; the views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of King County. Keys thanks the research sponsors of Wharton’s Zell/Lurie Real Estate Center for support. Reina thanks Claudia Aiken and Sydney Goldstein for their research assistance and the Stoneleigh Foundation for their support for surveys, and Ann Sewell, Anna Ortega, Marcella H. DeShurley and others in the City of Los Angeles for their expertise and data; the views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the City of Los Angeles. Humphries and Van Dijk thank the University of Chicago Women’s Board, J-PAL North America, William H. Block, Crown Family Philanthropies, the Polk Bros. Foundation, and the Yale Tobin Center for Economic Policy for financial support; Daniel Hertz, Erendira Rendon, and Paul Williams for sharing their expertise on program design and implementation; Carmelo Barbaro, Janelle Blackwood, Emma Boczek, Shannon Bradford, Anne Driscoll, Kelly Hallberg, Kirsten Jacobson, Emily Metz, Thomas Rietz, and Preethi Varma at the University of Chicago Inclusive Economy Lab for feedback and research support. We thank Ben Hyman, Rajashri Chakrabarti, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham (discussant), and seminar participants at the ASSA meetings, the Housing Initiative at Penn, the Urban Economics Association meetings, and the NBER Household Finance working group for helpful comments. This project was approved by IRB’s at the University of Chicago (IRB20-1673), the University of Notre Dame (IRB20-12-6355), and the University of Pennsylvania (843183). Analyses from two sites in our study were registered with the American Economic Association’s RCT Registry and the study IDs are AEARCTR-0007731 (Chicago) and AEARCTR-0007167 (King County). The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• Full survey instruments

• May 16, 2024