Housing and neighborhoods and a new national household panel
Issue title: Assessing the need for a new nationally representative household
panel survey in the United States
Subtitle:
Guest editors: Robert Moffitt, Robert F. Schoeni, Charles Brown, P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, Mick P. Couper, Ana V. Diez-Roux, Erik Hurst and Judith A. Seltzer
Affiliations: [a] Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA | [b] University of Chicago and NBER, Evanston, IL, USA
Correspondence:
[*]
Corresponding author: Lincoln Quillian, Department of Sociology, Northwestern University, 1810 Chicago Avenue, Evanston, IL 60208-1330, USA. Tel.: +1 847 491 7488; E-mail:l-quillian@northwestern.edu
Abstract: This paper considers the potential value of a new household panel
to help understand issues related to housing and neighborhood conditions in
the United States. The key scientific and policy issues that a panel study
would be particularly valuable for addressing are primarily descriptive and
include evaluating durations of exposures to housing and neighborhood
conditions, and understanding factors determining household mobility that in
turn determines the conditions that households experience and neighborhood
compositions. For these purposes a national household panel has important
advantages over existing data sources, and we offer several suggestions for
key data elements to collect to maximize the information available for
research in this area. We are agnostic about whether the creation of a new
national household panel would be more valuable than devoting resources to
enhancing the existing Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID).
Keywords: Housing, neighborhoods, panel data, residential mobility, neighborhood effects, social capital
