This article studies the effects of the largest residential racial desegregation initiative in U.S. history, the Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program. From the late 1970s to the 1990s, Gautreaux moved thousands of Black families into predominantly white neighborhoods to support racial and economic integration. We link historical program records to administrative data and use plausibly exogenous variation in neighborhood placements to study how desegregating moves affect children in the long run. Being placed in the predominantly white neighborhoods targeted by the program significantly increases children’s future lifetime earnings and wealth. These moves also increase the likelihood of marriage and particularly raise the probability of being married to a white spouse. Moreover, placements through Gautreaux affect neighborhood choices in adulthood. Those placed in predominantly white neighborhoods during childhood live in more racially diverse areas with higher rates of upward mobility nearly 40 years later.

More than two million U.S. households have an eviction case filed against them each year. Policy makers at the federal, state, and local levels are increasingly pursuing policies to reduce the number of evictions, citing harm to tenants and high public expenditures related to homelessness. We study the consequences of eviction for tenants using newly linked administrative data from two major urban areas: Cook County (which includes Chicago) and New York City. We document that before housing court, tenants experience declines in earnings and employment and increases in financial distress and hospital visits. These pre trends pose a challenge for disentangling correlation and causation. To address this problem, we use an instrumental variables approach based on cases randomly assigned to judges of varying leniency. We find that an eviction order increases homelessness and hospital visits and reduces earnings, durable goods consumption, and access to credit in the first two years. Effects on housing and labor market outcomes are driven by effects for female and Black tenants. In the longer run, eviction increases indebtedness and reduces credit scores.