Noémie Sportiche, PhD

Noémie Sportiche, PhD

About me

I’m a health policy researcher with a background in social epidemiology and urban planning. My work as a researcher at Mathematica and a postdoctoral associate in Harvard’s Department of Economics aims to understand how social policies can improve health, equity, and social mobility. Within this area, I have particular expertise in urban development and housing policy.

I earned my PhD from Harvard’s Health Policy program, where my dissertation examines the impact of housing policies and housing market trends on social mobility and health outcomes. This work is inspired by the four years I spent as an urban planner for the Metropolitan Area Planning Council. At Mathematica I have worked on projects for the California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS), the California Department of Aging (CDA), the Social Security Administration (SSA), and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). You can find more information on my work in the projects and research sections of this site.

I’m now based in San Francisco and love connecting with people and finding new opportunities for collaboration so if you are interested in my work (or anything else), please reach out via the contact form!

Interests
  • Population health
  • Housing policy
  • Policy approaches/evaluations that address major social and economic challenges
  • Social and structural determinants of health
Education
  • PhD in Health Policy, methods concentration, 2023

    Harvard University

  • MS in Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2013

    Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

  • BSc in Cognitive Science, 2007

    University of California, Los Angeles

Projects

Funded Research

Principal Investigators: David Cutler and Noémie Sportiche

The Impact of Fair Share Housing Policies on Racial Disparities in Health and Opportunity: Evidence from Massachusetts’ Chapter 40B

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Policies for Action ($ 249,267)

Research Team: Hector Blanco, Madeleine Daepp, and Erin M. Graves
Policy Partners: Barry Keppard and Karina Milchman at the Metropolitan Area Planning Council


Research

Selected Papers

Early-Life Health Impacts of Affordable Housing in Higher-Income Areas:
Evidence from Massachusetts Chapter 40B
  [Working paper available here]

Desegregation-focused housing policies aimed at reducing disparities in neighborhood conditions may also reduce disparities in health outcomes. This paper examines the effects of one such policy on the health of pregnant people and their newborn infants. Specifically, I study the impact of Massachusetts Chapter 40B, a major civil rights-era housing policy that increases the supply of affordable ownership and rental housing in higher-income areas to facilitate moves for lower-income households to those areas. Using a difference-in-differences approach that compares the health outcomes of birthing parents who move to 40B housing to those of demographically-matched birthing parents who move from similar origin neighborhoods, I find that moving to 40B housing produces meaningful improvements in birth outcomes and marginal gains in birthing parents health only among 40B renters. I find no evidence of health effects among 40B owners. Among renters, improvements in birth outcomes are driven largely by people moving from neighborhoods with higher levels of poverty, more Black and Hispanic residents, and higher male incarceration rates. These results suggest that affordable housing policies like 40B can help reduce racial and economic disparities in early-life health among certain populations.

Economic Crises and Mental Health: Effects of the Great Recession on Older Americans
With David Cutler   [NBER working paper available here]

This paper examines the effect of the Great Recession of 2007-2009 on the mental health of older adults, using longitudinal Health and Retirement Study data linked to area-level data on house prices. We use a variety of measures to capture mental health and rely on the very large cross-sectional variation in falling house prices to identify the impact of the Great Recession on those outcomes. We also account for people who moved in response to falling prices by fixing each person’s location immediately prior to the house price collapse. Our central finding is that the Great Recession had heterogeneous effects on health. While mental health was not affected for the average older adult, mental health declined among homeowners with few financial assets, who were therefore more vulnerable to falling house prices. Importantly, health impacts in this group differed by race and ethnicity: depression and functional limitations worsened among Black and other non-white homeowners and medication use increased among white homeowners. There were no measurable impacts for Hispanic homeowners. These results highlight the importance of examining heterogeneity across multiple dimensions when examining the health impacts of economic conditions.


Can Fair Share Policies Expand Neighborhood Choice? Evidence from Bypassing Exclusionary Zoning under Massachusetts Chapter 40B
With Hector Blanco, Madeleine Daepp, Erin M. Graves, and David Cutler
[Housing Policy Debate paper available here]

Opening up neighborhoods that offer greater opportunities for social mobility to low-and moderate-income households remains a challenge in the United States. Exclusionary zoning practices act as a barrier to current efforts by restricting the supply of affordable housing. In this paper, we examine whether fair share policies which seek to bypass these restrictive zoning practices offer a potential solution. Focusing on Massachusetts Chapter 40B, we find clear evidence that such policies expand the types of neighborhoods currently available to low- and moderate-income households. Leveraging novel data on 40B development addresses linked to a wide range of public and administrative records, we find that 40B residents live in neighborhoods with greater economic mobility, higher performing schools, greater social capital, less pollution, better health outcomes, and lower incarceration rates than both the typical Massachusetts resident and the beneficiaries of the state's Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, Housing Choice Voucher, and Public Housing programs. Consistent with previous research on policies that have segregated affordable housing and opportunity, we also find that 40B neighborhoods are substantially whiter and more affluent than both types of comparison areas. Differences on measures associated with economic mobility between 40B neighborhoods and those with other program beneficiaries are strikingly large. An examination of underlying policy mechanisms suggests that bypassing exclusionary zoning plays a central role in explaining these differences in neighborhood conditions.


Local Effects of Bypassing Zoning Regulationss
With Hector Blanco   [SSRN working paper available here]

An increasing number of jurisdictions are passing regulations to allow for denser housing in high-income areas. This paper examines how local house prices and existing residents–who are often strongly opposed to these policies–react to this new construction. We focus on housing constructed under Chapter 40B, a Massachusetts state policy that requires all municipalities to maintain a minimum proportion of affordable housing and allows developers to bypass local zoning regulations if those minimums are not met. Using a difference-in-differences design that compares housing located near 40B developments to housing located slightly farther away paired with rich individual-level data, we provide two sets of results. First, large 40B developments lead to substantial decreases in nearby house prices, while smaller developments do not affect prices. Second, nearby residents respond by moving out at higher rates after large 40B developments are constructed, although we do not observe any significant changes in existing residents’ political participation at the state or federal level.



For more information on my research, please see my CV.

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