By Sophia Bertuzzi Samilski
Pierre-Loup Beauregard is in the final year of his PhD at the Vancouver School of Economics as a Stone Centre Fellow. After thoroughly enjoying economic theory classes at Université du Québec à Montréal, Beauregard completed his master’s in economics at Queen’s University and applied to PhD programs across the country and in the United States. He ultimately decided to pursue his studies at the VSE for its strong reputation and faculty in labour economics and policy driven research.
“UBC is such a good labour school with Thomas [Lemieux], Nicole [Fortin], David [Green], [and] Kevin Milligan,” Beauregard said. “That was quite convincing for me, [and] it was quite exciting to come here.”
Throughout his time at UBC, he has pursued research aimed at mitigating poverty and improving intergenerational mobility through public policy. He explained that studying individuals that are at risk of staying in poverty and policy targeted at lifting people out of poverty drives a lot of his research, making the Stone Centre fellowship a natural fit for the Canadian economist.
Beauregard’s job market paper, “It’s About Time: Social Housing, Parental Labour Supply, and Long-Term Child Outcomes,” measures the impact of subsidized social housing projects in Toronto and Montreal on parental labour market behaviour and on their children’s adult outcomes.
Once families are accepted into the program, their rent is calculated on a rent-geared-to-income basis. In his paper, he found that upon entry to social housing, a large and significant reduction in parental labour market participation and earnings followed. According to Beauregard, these policies function much like a tax where increasing your income results in paying more rent, ultimately discouraging additional work.
Yet, when looking at longer-term outcomes, he finds that children with earlier and longer exposure to social housing achieve better adult outcomes, including higher earnings and greater educational attainment.
“What I’m really identifying is ‘What’s the effect of one additional year of social housing?’ A child that entered [social housing] at five [years old] instead of eight would [have better outcomes],” Beauregard said.
“You have those two results, kind of a paradox. Social housing is bad for parents’ labour supply, but at the same time, good for long term child outcomes.”
In his paper, he shows that these outcomes are directly related. As parents work less, they devote more time to childcare, thereby improving their children’s long-term outcomes. Beauregard says that while it is commonly assumed that quality of neighbourhood drives the effectiveness of social housing, his findings show that neighbourhood differences in Canada matter far less than in the United States, where neighbourhoods are much more heterogenous. In Canada, social housing projects are scattered broadly across cities, not just in lower-income communities like most of the social housing projects in the United States.
“The fact that the project isn’t a good or a bad neighbourhood doesn’t really change anything, because the environmental exposure that children get is just the [social housing] project itself,” Beauregard said. “What’s really important is how their parents are responding when they get this large transfer.”
Beauregard’s research shows that while the benefits of subsidized social housing can take decades to realize, they massively outweigh the initial costs.
“If you were to ignore the effects on children, you would incorrectly conclude that this policy is probably not desirable because it is quite expensive and you don’t get a lot of social benefit. Once you really consider everything, you can conclude otherwise,” Beauregard said.
“When you take the effect [of the policy] on both parents and children, you actually find the returns for an additional dollar are quite high.”
By grounding his work in Canadian data and focusing on the Canadian context, Beauregard says that contributing meaningfully to policy conversations in Canada is major goal of his. Following his graduation in May, he will join the Department of Economics at Université de Montréal as an Assistant Professor.
“[Contributing to the debate in Canada] is definitely something I aspire to do,” he said. “And shape how policy evolves.”
Sophia Bertuzzi Samilski is an undergraduate student in the Bachelor of International Economics program at UBC and a Research Assistant at the Stone Centre.