Professor Sharon Barnhardt, incoming Director of the Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS) Nuffield - FLAME University, recently published a paper in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics titled: Moving to Opportunity or Isolation? Network Effects of a Randomized Housing Lottery in Urban India. Professor Barnhardt's work explores the importance of social networks in creating housing programs for people from lower-income backgrounds. Her research studies the effects of a housing lottery and finds improvements in housing but "no change in tenure security, family income, or human capital."
The co-authors for this research project were Rohini Pande, Mohammed Kamal Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and Erica Field, Associate Professor of Economics at Duke University. This project was supported by research grants from the National Science Foundation (USA), the US Department of Labor ILAB, the Centre for Microfinance at the Institute for Financial Management and Research (IFMR) in Chennai, the Mossavar- Rahmani Center for Business and Government, the Real Estate Academic Initiative at Harvard University and the Exxon Mobil Foundation under the Closing the Global Gender Gap Initiative in Economic Participation (hosted by the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard University).
Professor Barnhardt is an Affiliate of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She will be joining FLAME University in 2017.
Here is the link to the publication.