INTRODUCTION TO THE RESEARCH ARTICLES

Institutions of higher education aim to equip students with knowledge, skills, and opportunities that will lead to labor market success and future well-being.A clear understanding of the labor markets in which a college operates stands to inform institution-level decision-making as well as broader questions about links between college-going and economic development, mobility, and inequality.To facilitate the study of these topics, this paper develops a new measure of such markets using data on alumni from a popular social and professional networking site.These data provide aggregate information on the geographic locations of former students for nearly all public and private non-profit colleges and universities in the United States.The authors first validate these data against existing government data sources to the extent possible, given that the new data cover a more extensive range of institutions and are available at finer levels of geography than any current source of such information.Using these data, the authors first produce several descriptive findings about the mobility of college graduates.For example, they estimate that 50% of recent college graduates live and work in the metro area nearest the institution they attended, with this figure climbing to about 67% residing in the same state.However, they find that about 28% of 2-year institutions disperse alumni more diversely than the average public 4-year institution, illustrating marked variation in the contours of the labor markets relevant to graduates of different types of institutions.The authors further illustrate the utility of these data through two exercises that address substantive, policy-relevant research questions in higher education.In the first, they find that the strength of the average labor market to which a college sends its graduates meaningfully predicts rates of intergenerational economic mobility across institutions, over and above key observable characteristics of colleges and the students they educate.In the second, the authors characterize the spatial distribution of both graduates and public spending (e.g., state appropriations to public colleges) to highlight the importance of accounting for migration when measuring the return on public investment in higher education. ARE PUBLIC HOUSING PROJECTS GOOD FOR KIDS AFTER ALL?Despite the best intentions, the benefits of public housing-such as improved affordability, better housing units, or greater residential stability-may be outweighed by detrimental effects of highpoverty neighborhoods, low-quality schools, neighborhood crime, or other (dis)amenities.Previous literature is discouraging, with much of the evidence based on examining exits from relatively undesirable public housing and comparing outcomes of children who left to those who remained.This paper draws on detailed individual-level longitudinal data on public school students in New York City