NYU Wagner

Ellen, Ingrid Gould and O'Regan, Katherine
“Crime and US Cities: Recent Patterns and Implications,”

Annals of the American Academy of Social and Political Science.  The Shape of the New American City.

Ellen, Ingrid Gould Katherina O’Regan and Dylan Conger.
“Dynamics of School Demographic Change: Immigrant Students and New York City,”

Education and Urban Society.

Ellen, Ingrid Gould and Katherine O’Regan, Amy Ellen Schwartz and Leanna Stiefel.
“Racial Segregation in Multiethnic Schools: Adding Immigrants to the Analysis,”

In Carol Camp Yeakey, Ed., Neighborhoods, Schools, and Social Inequality, Elsevier, Inc.

Racial segregation in America's schools remains persistently and disturbingly high, despite decades of institutional and policy changes. This paper considers one recent change common to many urban school districts - immigration - and examines whether and how the presence of a large number of immigrant students affects racial segregation. Exploiting a student-level data set including all elementary and middle school students in New York City's public schools, sixteen percent of whom are immigrants, we conduct a series of descriptive and exploratory analysis of possible avenues of influence. While it is unclear ex ante, both theoretically and compositionally, whether the presence of immigrants should increase or decrease inter-racial interaction, our results point to a decrease. Racial stratification of foreign-born students is generally higher than that of their native-born counterparts, and this is not solely attributable to income or language-skill differences. And while this heightened segregation decreases with time in the school system, the foreign-born/native-born differential is never eliminated. Importantly, we do find that there are very large differences within the immigrant population. Thus, the effect of immigrants on patterns of racial interaction in any district will depend crucially not only on the race of the immigrants, but also on their particular country of origin.

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O'Regan, Katherine and Ingrid Gould Ellen, Dylan Conger.
“Immigration and Urban Schools: The Dynamics of Demographic Change in the Nation's Largest School District,”

Education and Urban Society 41(3), 2009:  295-316

The authors use a rich data set on New York City public elementary schools to explore how changes in immigrant representation have played out at the school level, providing a set of stylistic facts about the magnitude and nature of demographic changes in urban schools. They find that while the city experienced an overall increase in its immigrant representation over the 5 years studied, its elementary schools did not. Although the average school experienced little change during this period, a significant minority of schools saw sizable shifts. The change does not mirror the White flight and 'tipping' associated with desegregation but rather suggests a tendency to stabilize, with declines in immigrant enrollments concentrated in schools with larger immigrant populations at the outset. The authors also find that changes in the immigrant shares influence the composition of the school's students, and that overall school demographic changes do not mirror grade-level changes within schools.

O'Regan, Katherine and Ingrid Gould Ellen.
“Reversal of Fortunes: Low Income Neighborhoods in the 1990s,”

Urban Studies, 2008, 45: 845-869.

This paper offers new empirical evidence about the prospects of lower-income, US urban neighbourhoods during the 1990s. Using the Neighborhood Change Database, which offers a balanced panel of census tracts with consistent boundaries from 1970 to 2000 for all metropolitan areas in the US, evidence is found of a significant shift in the fortunes of lower-income, urban neighbourhoods during the 1990s. There was a notable increase in the 1990s in the proportion of lower-income and poor neighbourhoods experiencing a gain in economic status. Secondly, in terms of geographical patterns, it is found that this upgrading occurred throughout the country, not just in selected regions or cities. Finally, it is found that the determinants of changes in lower-income, urban neighbourhoods shifted during the 1990s. In contrast to earlier decades, both the share of Blacks and the poverty rate were positively related to subsequent economic gain in these neighbourhoods during the 1990s.

Ellen, Ingrid and Brendan O'Flaherty.
“Social Programs and Household Size: Evidence from New York,”

Population Research and Policy Review Vol. 26 No. 4.

What determines how many adults live in a house? How do people divide themselves up among households? Average household sizes vary substantially, both over time and in the cross-section. In this paper, we describe how a variety of government policies affect living arrangements, intentionally or not. Using data from a survey of households in New York City, we find that these incentives appear to have an impact. Specifically, households receiving these housing and income subsidies are smaller on average (measured by number of adults). The impacts appear to be considerably larger than those that would occur if the programs were lump-sum transfers. Small average household size can be extremely expensive in terms of physical and environmental resources, higher rents, and possibly homelessness. Thus, we encourage policymakers to pay greater heed to the provisions built into various social policies that favor smaller households.

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Ellen, Ingrid Gould
“How Integrated Did We Become During the 1990s?,”

Fragile Rights in Cities. edited by John M. Goering, Rowman and Littlefield.

How fair are this country's urban housing markets and how effective has the government been at what it is charged to do in ensuring open and diverse housing options for this country's minority groups? Fragile Rights within Cities: Government, Housing, and Fairness offers a rich, multi-disciplinary assessment of the complex interface of housing, fairness, and government programs aimed at enforcing one of this nation's hallmark civil rights laws - the right to fair and open housing.

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Stiefel, Leanna and Amy Ellen Schwartz, Ingrid Gould Ellen.
“Disentangling the Racial Test Score Gap: Probing the Evidence in a Large Urban School District,”

Journal of Policy Analysis & Management, Winter 2007, Vol. 26 Issue 1, p7-30, 24p.

We examine the size and distribution of the gap in test scores across races within New York City public schools and the factors that explain these gaps. While gaps are partially explained by differences in student characteristics, such as poverty, differences in schools attended are also important. At the same time, substantial within-school gaps remain and are only partly explained by differences in academic preparation across students from different race groups. Controlling for differences in classrooms attended explains little of the remaining gap, suggesting little role for within-school inequities in resources. There is some evidence that school characteristics matter. Race gaps are negatively correlated with school size-implying small schools may be helpful. In addition, the trade-off between the size and experience of the teaching staff in urban schools may carry unintended consequences for within-school race gaps. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

Ingrid Gould Ellen and Ioan Voicu.
“Nonprofit Housing and Neighborhood Spillovers,”

Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Vol 25, No. 1, pp 31-52.

Nonprofit organizations play a critical role in U.S. housing policy, a role typically justified by the claim that their housing investments produce significant neighborhood spillover benefits. However, little work has actually been done to measure these neighborhood impacts. This paper compares the neighborhood spillover effects of city-supported rehabilitation of rental housing undertaken by nonprofit and for-profit developers, using data from New York City. To measure these benefits, we use increases in neighboring property values, estimated from a difference-in-difference specification of a hedonic regression model. We study the impacts of about 43,000 units of city-supported housing completed during the 1980s and 1990s, and our sample of property transactions includes nearly 300,000 individual sales. We find that both nonprofit and for-profit projects generate significant, positive spillover effects. This finding in itself is significant, given the widespread skepticism about the impact of subsidized housing on neighborhoods. We also find some differences across sectors. First, the impact of nonprofit housing remains stable over time, whereas the effect of for-profit housing declines with time. Second, while large for-profit and nonprofit developments deliver similar benefits, in the case of small projects, for-profit developments generate greater impacts than their nonprofit counterparts. These differences are consistent with theoretical predictions. In particular, in the presence of information asymmetries with respect to housing quality, the nondistribution constraint should lead nonprofits to deliver more durable housing, by softening incentives to shirk on quality and maintenance. Meanwhile, the fact that scale makes a difference to nonprofit impacts may reflect the capacity problems often faced by smaller nonprofits.

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Ellen, Ingrid Gould and Michael H. Schill, Amy Ellen Schwartz, Ioan Voicu.
“The Role of Cities in Providing Housing Assistance: A New York Perspective,”

In Amy Ellen Schwartz, ed., City Taxes, City Spending: Essays in Honor of Dick Netzer. Northampton, Mass: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd., 2004.

In a festschrift to Netzer-a public finance economist well known for his research on state and local taxation, urban public services, and nonprofit organizations-eight chapters apply microeconomics to problems facing urban areas and use statistical analysis to gain insight into practical solutions. The essays look at alternative methods of financing urban government, such as a land value tax and the impact of sales and income taxes on property taxation; at government expenditures, including housing subsidies; and at subsidies to nonprofit arts groups as well as the role of the nonprofit sector in providing K-12 education. Of interest to the fields of public finance, urban economics, and public administration.

Ellen, Ingrid Gould, Michael H. Schill, Amy Ellen Schwartz, and Ioan Voicu.
“Housing Production Subsidies and Neighborhood Revitalization: New York City’s Ten Year Capital Plan for Housing,” Economic Policy Review, June 2003, pages 71-85.

A perennial question in housing policy concerns the form that housing assistance should take. Although some argue that housing assistance should be thought of as a form of income support and advocate direct cash grants to needy households, others favor earmarked assistance—but they differ over whether subsidies should be given to the recipients as vouchers or to developers as production subsidies. The appropriate composition of housing assistance has recently taken on particular import. In 2000, Congress created the Millennial Housing Commission and gave it the task of evaluating the “effectiveness and efficiency” of methods to promote housing through the private sector. As part of its mandate, the commission is examining changes to existing programs as well as the creation of new production programs to increase affordable housing. This paper reexamines the debate over the appropriate form of housing assistance.
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