Journal article
A journey home: What drives how long people are homeless?
DA Cobb-Clark, N Herault, R Scutella, YP Tseng
Journal of Urban Economics | Published : 2016
Abstract
This paper uses survival analysis to model exits from two alternative forms of homelessness: sleeping on the streets ('literal homelessness') and not having a home of one's own ('housing insecurity'). We are unique in being able to account for time-invariant, unobserved heterogeneity. Like previous researchers, we find results consistent with negative duration dependence in models which ignore unobserved heterogeneity. However, controlling for unobserved heterogeneity, we find that duration dependence has an inverted U-shape with exit rates initially increasing (indicating positive duration dependence) and then falling. Exit rates out of both literal homelessness and housing insecurity fall ..
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Funding Acknowledgements
This paper uses data collected from the Journeys Home Project, a longitudinal survey based study managed by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research on behalf of the Australian Government Department of Social Services (DSS). The research was supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course (Project number CE140100027). The Centre is administered by the Institute for Social Science Research at The University of Queensland, with nodes at The University of Western Australia, The University of Melbourne and The University of Sydney. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Australian Research Council, DSS or the Melbourne Institute. The authors are grateful to David Ribar, Brendan O'Flaherty, the editor and the anonymous referees for providing valuable comments and to Abraham Chigavazira and Melisa Bubonya for their research assistance.