AREUEA 2025 Junior Scholar Program Participant Information

Grace Ortuzar

Bio

Grace is a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Notre Dame. Her research examines policies designed to benefit low-income tenants and reduce homelessness. Grace is an NBER graduate fellow in consumer financial management and has worked on several large-scale randomized controlled trials as a research associate at the Wilson-Sheehan Lab for Economics Opportunities. Grace's work has been supported by the Russell Sage Foundation and Notre Dame's Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts. Before graduate school, she studied Economics and Political Science at Indiana University and worked for RTI International.

Summary of Project(s)

Housing advocates, media outlets, and policymakers have long argued that a public eviction filing record—often referred to as the “Scarlet E”—carries significant consequences, particularly for low-income households. In this paper, we aim to provide the first causal estimates of the effect of a public eviction filing record. We leverage an Illinois statute that mandated all eviction cases be filed under seal between March 2020 and March 2022. Upon the expiration of the sealing policy on April 1, 2022, all new eviction filings were public record while previously filed cases remained sealed. Focusing on this policy end date, we adopt a regression discontinuity design comparing the mobility and credit trajectories of tenants with sealed and public eviction cases in Cook County, Illinois. The results of this study will inform policy decisions on record-sealing laws in jurisdictions across the country.

Grace Otuzar's Personal Website