What Can Linked Administrative Data Sets Teach Us About Eviction And Poverty In America?

Talk by:

Winnie van Dijk

Assistant Professor of Economics, Yale University

followed by an informal conversation with:

Anna Harvey

SSRC President

The report leading to the creation of the SSRC in 1923 outlined several major challenges for social science: data collection, interpretation, measurement, and causality. This lecture will explore the extent to which newly available administrative datasets — linked together to create what is sometimes referred to as “big data” — can help address these challenges and contribute to our understanding of the causes and consequences of eviction and poverty in the United States. The lecture will draw heavily on a study of eviction in Chicago and New York, which is joint work with Robert Collinson, John Eric Humphries, Nick Mader, Davin Reed and Daniel Tannenbaum.

About Winnie van Dijk

Winnie van Dijk is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at Yale. Her research is motivated by a desire to understand how economic policy can alleviate poverty and increase economic opportunity for low-income households. Professor Van Dijk’s work combines frontier econometric methods with the collection and curation of new data sets — including court filings, information collected by public agencies, surveys, and credit reports — to generate empirical evidence that can inform policy design and evaluation. Professor Van Dijk is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and she is affiliated with Opportunity Insights, the University of Chicago Inclusive Economy Lab, the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities, and CAGE. She graduated from the University of Chicago with a PhD in economics, and subsequently she was a Saieh Family Research Fellow at the Becker Friedman Institute and an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at Harvard. Before Chicago, she studied at the London School of Economics and at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.