Homework 2: Rental Assistance Program (AK)

Purpose

In this homework, you will get practice with questions related to measurement and size. The following questions are derived from real situations or questions about real policy evaluations.

Guidelines

• You can work by yourself or in groups of up to three.
• Submit your answers to Gradescope—only one per group.
• You will get points for correct answers. You will get points deducted if the answer contains more information that’s not necessary or if the answer contains incorrect statements among correct statements. In short, we are trying to incentivize students to use the least amount of characters while maximizing the accuracy of responses.
• If a do-file is required, always work on a do-file that you can save and submit it on gradescope.
• Your responses should be professionally formatted and written.
• The due date is Monday, January 26th, at 9:00pm EDT.

Context: Rental Assistance is and Housing Stability

Charlottesville introduced introduced a Rental Assistance Program (RAP) a couple of years ago aimed at preventing evictions and improving housing stability among low-income renters. The program provides temporary subsidies to households experiencing financial shocks (job loss, medical expenses, etc.). The city’s goal is to evaluate whether RAP is successful after two years of implementing it.

Questions

1. The city has limited budget and time for their staff to work on new projects, hence they are trying to decide which is one measure to focus on to evaluate the success of the program. For now, they are planning on collecting information from before the program and from after the program so that they can see if there is a meaningful shift in the outcomes after the program was implemented. You are in the committee that will help evaluates the measures. Which of the following would be the measure that you proposed the city should invest in assembling for their analysis?
1. Number of households receiving rental assistance
2. Percentage of household receiving rental assistance, where the denominator is the number of household that are renting.
3. Percentage of household receiving rental assistance, where the denominator is the number of household in the city.
4. Eviction filing rate per 1,000 renter households.
5. Share of people with rental assistance among the people who have been evicted
‣
Answer
2. Briefly explain why the measure you chose is most appropriate, and identify one limitation of each of the other measures.
‣
Answer
3. Some faculty of renowned public university in the city (😉) wants to help in evaluating this program since they may not trust the “city” report, they would like a third party to review the program. The university owns a lot of land in the city (making their information representative of the city’s issues) and they share with the faculty the amount spent on rent by their tenants in a given year.
1. If the researchers, observe an increase in average amount spent on rent when comparing before and after the policy was implemented, does this imply that there should be a decrease in housing stability in the city? Provide a realistic counter-example (i.e. increases in rent expenditure implying increases in housing stability). Use non-technical language.
‣
Answer
2. If the researchers observe a decrease in average amount spent on rent when comparing before and after the policy was implemented, does this imply that there should be an overall increase in housing stability in the city? Provide a realistic counter-example (i.e. decreases in average amount spend on rent implying decreases in housing stability). Use non-technical language.
‣
Answer
3. The researchers now observe two key facts (1) that average amount spent on rent increases after the policy was implemented and (2) the rate of people receiving some sort of housing assistance remains constant. With these two measurements in hand, could we now conclude if housing stability increases in the city or decreases?
‣
Answer
4. After the program was implemented, they sent out a survey to a random set of households to rate their housing stability. They do their research and follow common questions used in many studies to assess housing, including “How secure do you feel in your housing situation? (5 = Very secure, 4 = Secure, 3 = Neutral, 2 = Insecure, 1 = Very insecure)”. They come to you for feedback on whether you think this measurement is “good or not.” They acknowledge the limitations of the measure of subjectivity and ambiguity (i.e., Individuals may interpret the response categories differently, or one person’s “good” might be another’s “fair.”) and lack of specificity (i.e., The measure provides a broad overview but does not identify specific housing issues). Aside from acknowledging those limitations, what would your feedback be?
‣
Answer