Pierre-Loup Beauregard

I assess the effect of highly subsidized social housing on both parents' labour market outcomes and children's long-term earnings and educational attainment. I document substantial reductions in parents' labour supply and earnings around program entry, with nearly no effect on net-of-housing-cost income. A simple time-allocation model, in which social-housing receipt both relaxes the budget constraint and insures parents against earnings risk, rationalizes these large labour-supply responses. Then, I exploit variation in the timing of entry and find that children with longer exposure to social housing achieve better adult outcomes. I demonstrate that increases in parental time are a key causal factor in improvements in child outcomes. These results highlight a previously undocumented critical trade-off between maximizing the return for children and parents' labour market participation.