Highlights of 2011 - Institute for Policy Research - Northwestern ...

per year, yet surprisingly little research has been conducted on
it. Cook and Wing examine the three major studies involving
voucher programs—Moving to Opportunity, Chicago Housing
Authority, and Welfare to Work. The two researchers find that
all three experiments resulted in small improvements in moves
to better neighborhoods and housing quality; however, the
program basically serves as an income-support program.
IPR education economist David Figlio launched the second
panel with a presentation on the pathways through which the
intergenerational transmission of advantage operates and its
effect on school choice and voucher programs. Related research
on the effect of class on school choice and competition in
France was discussed by OSC’s Agnès van Zanten, followed by a
presentation by Northwestern doctoral student Dawna Goens
on parent-school relationships and parent empowerment.
The focus was on economic well-being in the following panel,
which featured IPR economist Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach
and IPR sociologist Christine Percheski. Schanzenbach
discussed the long-term health and economic effects of
the U.S. Food Stamp Program for children, while Percheski
compared and contrasted family characteristics and economic
well-being in the recent recession versus the recessions of
the early 1980s. Additional panels analyzed the various ways
class inequality influences the behavior of young people and
included IPR associate Barton Hirsch, who spoke about the
school-to-work transition among low-income and minority
youth, Northwestern doctoral student Robert Vargas, and
Agathe Voisin and Hugues Lagrange of OSC.
The second day began with a joint presentation by OSC’s
Philippe Coulangeon and Mirna Safi on the social mobility of
second-generation immigrants in France, and then economist
Joseph Ferrie, an IPR associate, discussed his research on
lead exposure, SES, and cognitive disparities. The next panel
discussed the various ways in which inequality impacts urban
areas with presentations by IPR political scientist Wesley G.
Skogan on his work examining neighborhood context and
crime, as well as Bruno Cousin of the University of Lille 1, who
examined refounded neighborhoods, and OSC director Alain
Chenu, who discussed social capital loss and political abstention.
IPR sociologist James Rosenbaum and IPR graduate research
assistant Kelly Iwanaga Becker each presented a lecture on ways
to reduce inequality in college enrollment rates that resulted
from a recent study examining the ways different high schools
handle the college application process. Inequality in relation to
child welfare was discussed next—first by IPR law professor
Dorothy Roberts, who discussed how child welfare systems
in the United States disproportionately affect minorities, and
then by Mathieu Ichou, a doctoral student from OSC, who
focused on inequities for children who have immigrated to
France. The workshop’s last panel included a presentation from
IPR associate and education researcher James Spillane on ways
in which urban students are perceived, and concluded with a
comparison of social mobility experiences in France, India, and
the United States by OSC postdoctoral fellow Jules Naudet.
French researcher Bruno Cousin (center) of the University of Lille
neighborhoods at the IPR/OSC comparative workshop on inequalities
Quillian co-organized the workshop with Figlio and OSC’s
Oberti. The Partner University Fund of the FACE Foundation,
NYC supported the workshop.
Housing Policies and Crime
Skogan was part of a research team that completed a study to
determine whether public housing relocatees have a significant
impact on crime in the neighborhoods they move to when
using housing vouchers. Commissioned by the Chicago Housing
Authority, the researchers examined the moves of Plan for
Transformation housing voucher recipients from 1999 to 2008,
collecting 25,000 data points from 813 different census tracts.
They tracked those who moved in or out of a census tract
on a quarterly basis and then looked at crime in the same
tract in the ensuing quarter and plugged this information into
a regression model. In both Chicago and Atlanta, which they
also studied, they found citywide decreases in violent, gun, and
property crime. Crime in neighborhoods where the public
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