Does residential mobility affect educational outcomes? Evidence from Chile

ABSTRACT

There is mixed evidence about the effects of residential mobility on children’s educational outcomes. In 2013, the Chilean Ministry of Housing implemented a social housing demolition programme, which focused on projects with severe structural and overcrowding problems. Residents from demolished buildings received a subsidy to relocate. In this paper, I conduct a two-way fixed effects analysis and mediation analysis to explore if residential mobility during school years affects attendance and grades for children who moved with this programme, compared to those who were eligible but did not move. Using data for the 2012–2018 period, I find that moving is associated with a decrease in attendance, but the decrease is reduced if the distance between housing and the school is less than 1 km. Moving is not associated with a change in grades, but attendance is, and acts as a mediator between moving and grades.

KEYWORDS:

• Housing
• planning
• vouchers
• demolition
• residential mobility

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing (MTO) is a 10-year randomized housing mobility program that was implemented in 1994, and combined rental assistance with housing counselling for low-income families in five public housing authorities in the United States (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development 2011)

2 For the United States, students are defined as having chronic absenteeism if they miss more than 10% of school days, considering excused and unexcused absences.

3 Before 1995, regulations did not allow beneficiaries to sell their units. In 1995, this was modified and allowed them to sell after 5 years of receiving the unit.

4 For any given year, there were less than 80 students with available SIMCE scores.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Agency of Research and Development (ANID) at the Chilean Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation, grant/award number [ANID/FONDAP/1513009].