Collaborative Research: Housing Status and Life Course after Privatization in Russia

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Housing Status and Life Course after Privatization in RussiaThis study examines whether and how ?housing status? (quantity, quality, and tenure) influences socioeconomic inequality, family formation and dissolution, and subjective perceptions and outlook. Social scientists observe that aspects of housing may directly shape outcomes such as the educational and occupational attainment of children, rates of marriage, cohabitation, divorce, and childbearing, and perceived security, happiness, life satisfaction, and political attitudes. But we do not know whether housing has independent causal effects on these outcomes because households obtain housing in a non-random manner: the same variables (such as family wealth and income) that affect access to housing also shape educational attainment, marriage rates, and happiness. In other words, housing may be endogenous to the outcomes it purportedly shapes. The project takes advantage of the opportunity that contemporary Russia offers to study the causal effects of housing. Under the Soviet system housing was allocated based on criteria like household structure, age, and seniority at work, not wealth and income. When the Soviet Union collapsed, housing stock was privatized by simply giving residents property rights to their dwellings. This privatization effectively locked-in the non-market distribution of housing status from the Soviet period. Subsequently, housing markets have not developed in Russia, due to mainly capital constraints. Thus, the distribution of housing status today is still based largely on Soviet-era criteria rather than market principles, giving us a unique opportunity to study whether and how housing status exerts independent causal effects on life course outcomes.To take advantage of this opportunity, the investigators will conduct an innovative survey of Russian urbanites ages 32-55, their spouses or cohabiting partners, and some of their parents. This cohort passed through crucial transitions to young and middle adulthood, when housing matters most, just before or after the collapse of the Soviet Union (in December 1991). The survey will obtain complete housing histories of focal respondents and their spouses/partners from 1991 (including extensive information on each dwelling lived in and how it was obtained) through 2012, education, household structure, employment, partnership, and childbearing histories, family background characteristics, the education of their children, a range of attitude measures, and other relevant information. Finally, they will survey the parents of 25% of focal respondents to verify the accuracy of retrospective housing histories and collect more information. Theoretically, the proposed research breaks new ground by conceptualizing the multiple dimensions of housing status both between and within households, relating them to a variety of specific outcomes, and dealing explicitly with issues of causal inference, all within an integrated framework. Empirically, the investigators will conduct unprecedented statistical analyses that assess the effects of housing more rigorously than has been possible in prior studies. The project will produce a major advance in social scientific understanding of the effects of housing in Russia, which in turn will dramatically improve knowledge about how housing might function in other national contexts. Broader impact. The survey will be unique in terms of its comprehensive measures of individual- and household-level housing status and of the outcomes and behaviors that housing is hypothesized to influence. The resulting data file will be available to the public, thereby adding a vital new resource for housing researchers. The investigators will write methodological papers analyzing the reliability of retrospective housing histories and drawing lessons regarding best practices in the methodology for survey research on housing. The substantive findings produced by the study will help policymakers, both within and outside Russia, craft effective policies to promote the positive and ameliorate the negative effects of housing on inequality, demographic change, and the well-being of their societies. The investigators will report on the policy implications of their studies in a series of policy memos.