Housing assistance in the U.S. has shifted from public provision toward subsidized provision through private markets. This paper studies how private provision may affect targeting by examining conversions of public housing through the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD). RAD allows housing authorities to convert their public housing to project-based contracts in order to leverage financing for renovations, often accompanied by a transfer of ownership or management to private entities. We use nationwide administrative data on public housing tenants and a difference-in-differences design that leverages plausibly exogenous variation in the timing of conversions to study impacts of RAD on targeting between 2014 and 2023. We provide suggestive evidence that there is targeting of relatively lower-income residents at conversions with non-profit managers compared to for-profit managers, potentially through the channels of waitlist priorities for new admissions and self-selection of households moving out with vouchers rather than for-profit managers pursuing terminations.

This paper examines the market-level effects of a universal childcare subsidy introduced in Poland in 2024. Exploiting the nationwide rollout of a childcare voucher in a system with predominantly private provision and low pre-reform enrollment, I use novel monthly administrative data covering all providers to estimate causal effects on fees, capacity, and enrollment. The voucher increases enrollment by 8 percent and capacity by 10 percent within fourteen months, primarily through the entry of new establishments. Effects vary across markets: enrollment rises most in rural areas and in towns and suburbs, while in cities the reform mainly induces reallocation from public to private providers. Although private providers enter low-coverage markets, they do not expand into pre-reform “childcare deserts.” The increase in municipalities with at least one provider is driven entirely by public provision. The voucher also accelerates expansion initiated by an earlier supply-side program, highlighting differences between demand- and supply-side instruments.

The present study explores the impact of the birth of half-siblings in stepfamilies on the likelihood of child support payments by non-resident parents for children residing in these families. In particular, we focus on married stepfamilies that cannot receive assistance from state child support enforcement agencies. This setting provides an intriguing environment to study non-resident parents’ behavior in the absence of state involvement.

We use German administrative tax data from 2010 to 2020 and an event-study approach that exploits variation in births within stepfamilies over time. The results show that the arrival of a new child increases the likelihood that non-resident parents fulfill their child support obligations by approximately 4.9 percentage points (18.2%) in the same year. This effect persists for the subsequent two years before becoming insignificant. Overall, the findings suggest that compliance with child support obligations varies within this institutional environment.