Papers

Abstract: This paper studies the effects of a desegregation policy consisting in closing down a middle school located in a deprived neighborhood and reallocating its students to other middle schools in the city. I analyze the direct effects on students from deprived neighborhoods (the “movers”), as well as the indirect peer effects on incumbent students in receiving schools (the “receivers”). In both cases, I make use of the staggered closure of middle schools in cities all over France as well as of the availability of control cities, and I compare cohorts of students before and after closure. Exhaustive administrative panel data at the student level allow me to account for potential selection of the movers into receiving middle schools as well as for a potential “rich flight” of the receivers by using the predicted middle school students should attend instead of the actual one. This also allows me to study how the direct and indirect effects of the policy vary with the proportion of new comers in the receiving schools. I find that a school closure leads to a decrease in the probability of dropping out of school after middle school for the movers that is driven by boys and students from low socioeconomic status (SES). Crucially, the probability of dropping out also decreases for the receivers for the same groups of students. The effects on the movers are observed despite a small increase in class size and while no effect on class size is found for the receivers. The effects on low-SES receivers are consistent with ranking effects being stronger than disruption effects. On the contrary, for high-SES receivers, I find a decrease in the probability of attending an academic high school that does not vary with the proportion of new comers. For them the data show evidence of a “rich flight” to the private system that can explain the previous effect while changes in classmates characteristics are unlikely to explain it. 

• • • • Abstract: Using a large scale randomized experiment, we first evaluate the impact of a global action of social mediation in Junior High school and primary school on the prevalence of violence, the level of well-being of students, and on the success of students at school. The program relies on the presence of a mediator in the school who takes care of violence issues by meeting with the concerned students and families, and who trains some students in peer mediation and the teachers in conflict mediation. It is thus specifically designed to tackle violence and bullying behavior by involving students, teachers, and parents. Thanks to a rich experimental design, we are able to compare the strength of the effects at different ages, ranging from 6 to 14 years old and to detect heterogeneous effects depending on the mediator's big-5 characteristics. Second, the impact of this program is compared to the impact of a second program, very cheap, consisting in surveying students at the beginning of the year on the level of violence that they face. In theory the very results of such a survey may per se increase teachers' awareness about violence issues in the school and thus induce more effort on their side to fight violence. Finally, we use the exogenous decrease in violence that we find to measure the impact of violence on children's cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes.

      • Policy Brief in French (with abstract in English): "Fighting Violence and Bullying in Elementary and Secondary School" / "Comment lutter contre la violence et le harcèlement à l'école et au collège ?", Y. Algan, N. Guyon and E. Huillery, LIEPP Policy Brief n°19, June 2015. View

      • Creation of a unique dataset: rich dataset collected in 2012-2014 covering students from 80 junior high schools and 240 primary schools in France from deprived neighborhoods including a large set of cognitive and socioemotional skills' measures, and matched to administrative data including long-term educational outcomes.

      • Media coverage:

• France Culture (one of the main French national radios): "Médiateur scolaire : déconstruire la violence du quotidien" (minutes 33 to 35), 18/10/2019

• Réseau Canopé : Focus sur le collège Ernest-Renan de Saint-Herblain (quartier Bellevue, agglomération nantaise) par Francis Delarue, avec interviews vidéos des différents acteurs

• Podcast sur la médiation sociale au collège : "Présents", par Camille Maestracci, produit par Citéo Médiation : Acast, Apple, Deezer, Spotify, Google podcast

Abstract: Residential segregation matters as it can lead to a socially inefficient equilibrium because of externalities. Crime is one of the main outcomes that has been shown to be strongly affected by peer and network effects. At the city level, a decrease in residential social segregation might lead to simple displacement effects with no net effect on crime, or to a decrease in crime due to peer and network effects. This paper studies the effects of a common national urban renewal program aiming at decreasing social segregation at the city level. An important feature of this program consists in demolishing deprived public housing buildings in the poorest neighborhoods to rebuild new ones on site as well as off site in other neighborhoods in the city. The other main feature of this program is to renew the remaining housing stock and public spaces in the targeted neighborhoods. The intensity of this program as well as the number of affected cities allow us to study the context in which such a desegregation policy leads to a net decrease in crime. To analyze the effects of this program, we use very geographically precise income tax data as well as crime data at the city level. Our identification strategy relies on variations in the year the policy started in each city and on the existence of credibly untreated cities. We first show that the policy led to an overall decrease in residential income segregation in treated cities, and that this effect is strengthened when the predicted intensity of the demolitions increases. We are now analyzing the effects on crime depending on the initial level of public housing segregation in the city. We provide evidence that the initial level of public housing segregation in the city is uncorrelated with several important features that could explain the effects that we obtain.

• Creation of a unique dataset: rich dataset collected in 2012-2014 covering about 30,000 children across 500 French primary schools from deprived neighborhoods including a large set of cognitive and socioemotional skills' measures at 7 or 9 years old, and matched to administrative data including long-term educational outcomes.

Abstract: This paper studies the impact of a new parenting intervention designed to improve educational achievement of six years old children from socially disadvantaged families. Parental involvement and parenting skills are major determinants of children’s motivation for and success at school, but they are unequally distributed among social groups. The aim of the intervention is to help parents to help their child to learn better by developing meta-cognitive strategies, such as using step-by-step approaches (also known as “scaffolding”) in learning tasks, encouraging one’s child, using autonomy-fostering practices and contingent feedbacks, and increasing parental responsiveness. The literature has shown that these parenting practices are highly correlated with children’s self-regulated learning skills, that is, learning strategies, autonomy, as well as motivation to learn, which are themselves powerful predictors of school proficiency. However, evidence on a potential causal relationship between parenting practices and children outcomes is still very scarce. This paper will be the first to test whether a simple and cheap information intervention using cutting-edge knowledge from developmental cognitive neuroscience can improve parenting practices for socially disadvantaged families in a way that fosters children’s success at school. Namely, the six-month long intervention consists in weekly text messages including a link to short videos (3 to 5 minutes) providing simple tips for parents and games to do in everyday life with their child. The last important feature of this project is its interdisciplinary nature that is reflected in the diversity of the team: the content of the intervention is based on state of the art knowledge from cognitive science, while the evaluation methods use both qualitative methods from sociology and quantitative methods from economics.

Abstract: This paper will make use of two RCTs ran to study the effect of a parental involvement program in middle schools located in deprived neighborhoods. The first RCT is the one the REStud paper is based on, while the second RCT studied techniques to increase take-up of this program. We are currently requesting authorization to match the survey data of both RCTs to administrative data to measure long-term educational outcomes.