Subprime Babies: The Foreclosure Crisis and Initial Health Endowments

Abstract

The subprime mortgage crisis was a devastating financial shock for many homeowners. This research uses a probabilistic matching strategy to link foreclosure records with birth certificate records from 2006 to 2010 in California to identify birth parents who experienced a foreclosure. Among mothers who did, those issued a loan during the peak of subprime lending from 2005 to 2007 were more Hispanic and socioeconomically disadvantaged than mothers with loans originating before 2005. We use a mother fixed-effects analyses of ever-foreclosed mothers issued a loan during 2006 and 2007 and find that infants in gestation during or after the foreclosure had a lower birth weight for gestational age than those born earlier, suggesting that the foreclosure crisis was a plausible contributor to disparities in initial health endowments.

Racialized Housing Discrimination and Population Health: a Scoping Review and Research Agenda

“…The literature on the impact of displacement and dispossession on health is largely missing from this review. Our search returned studies on the health implications of eviction [ 97 – 101 ] and foreclosures [ 102 – 108 ]. We found none specifically linked discriminatory (i.e., disparate intent or outcome) evictions or foreclosures to health outcomes.…”

Civil Society Goes to School: Parent-Teacher Associations and the Equality of Educational Opportunity

“…Although we document only the formation, dissolution, and revenues of elementary school-supporting associations in a single state, these data are available for a diverse array of nonprofit organizations across the country. Our approach to matching data and verifying match quality is labor intensive, and we are currently working to develop a more automated approach that uses probabilistic matching techniques to link organizations to schools on a much larger scale using directory variables such as name, address, and geocodes (see Downing and Bruckner 2019; Goerge and Wiegand 2019). Ultimately, our goal is to provide data on PTAs and other school-linked nonprofit organizations for all U.S. public schools via a CCD link.…”

Using Administrative Data for Social Science and Policy

“…Our introduction describing Durham Connects highlights the power of these insights for understanding the needs of families across diverse domains, and others likewise underscore the utility of linking administrative records across domains to understand the challenges facing families in poverty (Goerge and Wiegand 2019). Research linking data across domains documents how inequality in one domain shapes outcomes in others, highlighting, for example, the health consequences of foreclosure (Downing and Bruckner 2019) and how air pollution shapes mortality risk (Di et al 2017). Other research in this vein allows us to understand the broad effects of policies, showing how lead abatement efforts lower children’s blood lead levels and improve student achievement (Aizer, Currie et al 2016), and how Superfund site cleanup improves children’s later educational outcomes (Persico, Figlio, and Roth 2016).…”