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Kearney, Melissa S Pardue, Luke Digital Repository at the University of Maryland University of Maryland (College Park, Md.) Economics 2022-02-04T06:38:04Z 2022-02-04T06:38:04Z 2021 https://doi.org/10.13016/ecih-kylp http://hdl.handle.net/1903/28454 In this dissertation, I study the impact of public policies on three related but distinct economic outcomes: employment, housing stability, and income inequality. In the second chapter, I examine the employment impact of the Paycheck Protection Program, a key element of the federal government’s fiscal stimulus efforts during the 2020 coronavirus-induced recession. To assess the effect of this support on small business employment, I exploit differential timing in when firms rolled off headcount requirements needed to receive loan forgiveness. I find that as the PPP covered period expired, companies reduced active employment by a statistically significant 0.41% per week and 1.6% in the four weeks post-expiration. I estimate that, in aggregate, 907,200 jobs were lost within the four weeks after firms’ covered periods expired, as companies no longer need to maintain pre-COVID-19 headcount levels to receive PPP loan forgiveness. In the third chapter, I investigate the effectiveness of housing vouchers, the most common form of low-income rental assistance, in preventing households from facing eviction. I examine this question using newly-available public data on the universe of court-ordered evictions in the United States and exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in historical housing voucher allocation. I find that every four to six vouchers prevent one eviction in a given county, and that this effect is greater in counties with higher rent burdens and longer voucher waitlists. A simple back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that, on average, one fourth of the cost of a housing voucher can be recovered through savings in eviction prevention alone. In the final chapter, I conduct an empirical simulation exercise that gauges the plausible impact of increased rates of college attainment on a variety of measures of income inequality and economic insecurity. Using two different methodological approaches—a distributional approach and a causal parameter approach—I find that increased rates of bachelor’s and associate degree attainment would meaningfully increase economic security for lower-income individuals, reduce poverty and near-poverty, and shrink gaps between the 90th and lower percentiles of the earnings distribution. However, increases in college attainment would not significantly reduce inequality at the very top of the distribution. en ESSAYS ON THE EFFECTS OF PUBLIC POLICIES ON HOUSING, EMPLOYMENT, AND INCOME INEQUALITY Dissertation Public policy Labor economics Statistics open.access