John Eric Humphries

Assistant professor in economics at Yale University.

I am a labor economist who studies how public policy shapes economic opportunity for children, families, and young adults. Three themes unite his work: the dynamics of human capital accumulation, novel measurement strategies through data linkages, and quasi-experimental methods guided by economic frameworks. My research provides empirical evidence on policy questions spanning education, housing, and criminal justice. For example, my recent work examines the returns to investments from pre-K through graduate school, the effects of eviction and homelessness on children and families, and how conviction and incarceration shape economic trajectories. My CV is available here.

I am an NBER Faculty Research Fellow (Labor Studies and Economics of Education), member of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity "Inequality: Measurement, Interpretation, and Policy" working group (MIP), an affiliate of the CESifo Research Network, and an affiliate of the Inclusive Economy Lab. I grew up in Eagle River, Alaska and enjoy backpacking, cross-country skiing, and blues guitar.

My office is room B328 in 87 Trumbull St. and I can be contacted at [email protected].

Yale undergraduates interested in working as a research assistant, see instructions here.

Selected Publications and Working Papers

Parents' Earnings and the Returns to Universal Pre-Kindergarten

Revise and Resubmit at Econometrica [+details] [latest draft] [open link]

with Christopher Neilson, Xiaoyang Ye, and Seth Zimmerman

This paper asks whether universal pre-kindergarten (UPK) programs can increase parental earnings and, if so, how much these gains affect the economic returns to UPK. Using admissions lotteries for an extended-day UPK program in New Haven, Connecticut, we find that UPK enrollment increases childcare coverage to span the workday and raises parents' earnings by 21.7% during pre-kindergarten. Gains persist for at least six years. We find little evidence of effects on children's academic and behavioral outcomes during elementary and middle school. Combining these results, we demonstrate that tax revenues from parents' earnings gains reduce the net government costs of UPK by 90% relative to estimates that ignore gains for parents. Overall, we estimate that each dollar spent yields $10 in benefits. Our findings demonstrate the potential of UPK programs that combine quality education with full-day childcare and underscore the importance of thinking about parents when designing and evaluating early-childhood policies.
Conviction, Incarceration, and Recidivism: Understanding the Revolving Door

The Quarterly Journal of Economics (2025) [+details] [link]

with Aurelie Ouss, Megan Stevenson, Kamelia Stavreva, and Winnie van Dijk

Noncarceral conviction is a common outcome of criminal court cases: for every individual incarcerated, there are approximately three who are recently convicted but not sentenced to prison or jail. We develop an empirical framework for studying the consequences of noncarceral conviction by extending the binary-treatment judge IV framework to settings with multiple treatments. We outline assumptions under which widely-used 2SLS regressions recover margin-specific treatment effects, relate these assumptions to models of judge decision-making, and derive an expression that provides intuition about the direction and magnitude of asymptotic bias when they are not met. Under the identifying assumptions, we find that noncarceral conviction (relative to dismissal) leads to a large and long-lasting increase in recidivism for felony defendants in Virginia. In contrast, incarceration relative to noncarceral conviction leads to a short-run reduction in recidivism, consistent with incapacitation. While the identifying assumptions include a strong restriction on judge decision-making, we argue that any bias resulting from its failure is unlikely to change our qualitative conclusions. Lastly, we introduce an alternative empirical strategy, and find that it yields similar estimates. Collectively, these results suggest that noncarceral felony conviction is an important and potentially overlooked driver of recidivism.
The Effects of Eviction on Children

Revise and Resubmit at the Journal of Political Economy [+details] [latest draft]

with Robert Collinson, Deniz Dutz, Nicholas S. Mader, Daniel Tannenbaum, and Winnie van Dijk

Eviction may be an important channel for the intergenerational transmission of poverty, and concerns about its effects on children are often raised as a rationale for tenant protection policies. We study how eviction impacts children's home environment, school engagement, educational achievement, and high school completion by assembling new data sets linking eviction court records in Chicago and New York to administrative public school records and restricted Census records. To disentangle the consequences of eviction from the effects of correlated sources of economic distress, we use a research design based on the random assignment of court cases to judges who vary in their leniency. We find that eviction increases children's residential mobility, homelessness, and likelihood of doubling up with grandparents or other adults. Eviction also disrupts school engagement, causing increased absences and school changes. While we find little impact on elementary and middle school test scores, eviction substantially reduces high school course credits. Lastly, we find that eviction reduces high school graduation and use a novel bounding method to show that this finding is not driven by differential attrition. The disruptive effects of eviction appear worse for older children and boys. Our evidence suggests that the impact of eviction on children runs through the disruption to the home environment or school engagement rather than deterioration in school or neighborhood quality, and may be moderated by access to family support networks.
Equilibrium Effects of Eviction Protections: The Case of Legal Aid

Revise and Resubmit at the American Economic Review [+details] [latest draft]

with Robert Collinson, Stephanie Kestelmann, Scott Nelson, Winnie van Dijk, and Daniel Waldinger

"Right-to-counsel" programs provide free legal assistance to tenants in eviction court. Legal assistance can delay or prevent eviction. However, large-scale legal assistance programs can also generate costs for tenants due to equilibrium rental market responses. In this paper, we study how right to counsel impacts rental markets when implemented at scale, and quantify the policy's impact on tenant welfare. Leveraging the geographic rollout of New York City's program, we find listed rent prices rose by $22-$38/month within two years of policy implementation, with larger increases in areas with higher baseline eviction rates. We do not find evidence that landlords adjusted on other margins, such as tenant screening or improvements to habitability. Guided by these results, we develop a framework to evaluate the policy's welfare implications for tenants, incorporating the trade-off between protection from eviction and higher rent prices. We quantify the parameters of our framework using linked data on eviction court cases, rental housing listings, and tenant earnings trajectories. Despite the direct benefits and insurance value of stronger eviction protections, the estimated price increases are large enough to generate a small net reduction in ex-ante tenant welfare.
Non-payment and Eviction in the Rental Housing Market

Revise and Resubmit at the Journal of Political Economy [+details] [latest draft]

with Scott Nelson, Dam Linh Nguyen, Winnie van Dijk, and Daniel Waldinger.

Recent research has documented the prevalence and consequences of evictions, but our understanding of underlying drivers of the eviction rate and the scope for policy to affect it remains limited. In this paper, we study landlords' decisions to evict tenants and how these decisions may be influenced by policy. We combine novel lease-level ledger data from low-income rental markets with a model of the landlord's eviction decision to characterize the persistence of shocks to tenant default risk, landlords' information about these shocks, and landlords' cost of eviction. Our data show that nonpayment is common, is frequently tolerated by landlords, and is often followed by recovery, suggesting that landlords face a trade-off between initiating a costly eviction or waiting to learn whether a tenant can continue paying. Our dynamic discrete choice model of the eviction decision captures this tradeoff. Estimates indicate that filing an eviction costs landlords the equivalent of 2-3 months of rent, and that the majority of evictions involve tenants who are unlikely to pay going forward. This implies that uniformly applied policies can generate additional forbearance for tenants, but they do not prevent most evictions. We find that 15% of those evicted would have resumed paying rent, suggesting a role for more targeted interventions. Among the policy instruments we consider, direct financial incentives for landlords---such as taxes and subsidies---are more likely to durably prevent evictions than procedural delays.
Complementarities in High School and College Investments

Revise and Resubmit at the Journal of Political Economy [+details] [latest draft]

with Juanna Schrøter Joensen and Gregory F. Veramendi.

This paper examines how high school specialization shapes college investment decisions and their subsequent returns through dynamic complementarities. Using Swedish administrative data, we estimate a dynamic Roy model that accounts for selection on multidimensional skills, family background, prior investments, and unobserved heterogeneity. We identify the model using rich skill measures and quasi-experimental variation in program popularity. For marginal students, STEM specialization in high school increases wages by 9%, with more than half this return attributed to dynamic complementarities that enhance the productivity of subsequent college investments. Consequently, we find that counterfactual policies encouraging high school STEM specialization generate twice the returns of equivalent college-level interventions. These findings demonstrate how the timing of specialized human capital investments matters during adolescence, with important implications for education policies that encourage or restrict specialization.
Eviction and Poverty in American Cities

The Quarterly Journal of Economics (2024) [+details] [link]

with Robert Collinson, Nicholas S. Mader, Davin Reed, Daniel Tannenbaum, and Winnie van Dijk

More than two million U.S. households have an eviction case filed against them each year. Policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels are increasingly pursuing policies to reduce the number of evictions, citing harm to tenants and high public expenditures related to homelessness. We study the consequences of eviction for tenants using newly linked administrative data from two major urban areas: Cook County (which includes Chicago) and New York City. We document that prior to housing court, tenants experience declines in earnings and employment and increases in financial distress and hospital visits. These pre-trends pose a challenge for disentangling correlation and causation. To address this problem, we use an instrumental variables approach based on cases randomly assigned to judges of varying leniency. We find that an eviction order increases homelessness and hospital visits and reduces earnings, durable goods consumption, and access to credit in the first two years. Effects on housing and labor market outcomes are driven by impacts for female and Black tenants. In the longer-run, eviction increases indebtedness and reduces credit scores.
Returns to Education: The Causal Effects of Education on Earnings, Health and Smoking

Journal of Political Economy (2018) [+details] [link]

with James J. Heckman and Gregory F. Veramendi

This paper estimates returns to education using a dynamic model of educational choice that synthesizes approaches in the structural dynamic discrete choice literature with approaches used in the reduced form treatment effect literature. It is an empirically robust middle ground between the two approaches which estimates economically interpretable and policy-relevant dynamic treatment effects that account for heterogeneity in cognitive and non-cognitive skills and the continuation values of educational choices. Graduating college is not a wise choice for all. Ability bias is a major component of observed educational differentials. For some, there are substantial causal effects of education at all stages of schooling.

See my research page for a full list of publications and working papers.