Research

Publications

“School Segregation in the Presence of Student Sorting and Cream-Skimming: Evidence from a School Voucher Reform” (accepted at Journal of Public Economics)

Critics of school choice argue that when private schools compete with public schools, they select the best students from public schools (cream-skim), increasing socioeconomic segregation. Using a 2008 education reform implemented in Chile aimed to decrease education inequality, I study the mechanisms that underlie the sorting of students in a public-private system. Specifically, I exploit the shock to schools' incentives to test for selection based on socioeconomic characteristics and show that parents' school choices are restricted by this cream-skimming behavior. I estimate a demand model that incorporates these implicit admissions restrictions to capture parents' preferences for different school characteristics and peer composition. I show that ignoring cream-skimming leads to underestimating poor parents' preferences for school quality. I find that the decrease in cream-skimming induced by the reform led to lower public school enrollment and that strong preferences for high-income peers drove increased enrollment in schools that opted out of the reform. Overall, this led to increased segregation with higher impacts in markets with greater competition.

Working Papers

“The Dynamic Market for Short-Cycle Higher Education Programs” , with J.E. Carranza, M.M. Ferreyra (R&R Journal of Human Capital)

We investigate entry and exit of short-cycle higher education programs (SCPs), lasting two or three years. Exploiting administrative data from Colombia, we study markets defined by geographic location and field of study. We find that institutions open new programs in response to local labor market demand, as well as competition and costs. Within a market, they often close and open programs simultaneously, possibly due to capacity constraints. SCPs are more responsive to local labor demand than bachelor's programs; among SCP providers, private and non-university institutions are most responsive. These findings have implications for ongoing changes in skill demand.

“School Choice and Class-Size Effects: Unintended Consequences of a Targeted Voucher Program” , with Olivier de Groote  (submitted)

We propose a novel method to estimate education production functions on observational data in a context of school choice. We exploit panel data of schools and estimate heterogeneous effects, while allowing for unobserved school, student, and teacher characteristics to be correlated with observed inputs. We then use this model to study the channels behind changes in observed test scores following a voucher reform in Chile.  After the reform, many students left public schools, leading to a passive decrease in class size. We show that this can explain part of the policy effects as we find large class size effects for several schools, especially those that saw a decrease after the policy change.

In Progress

"Peer Learning in College Applications" (with E. Prager)

Decisions about college application and attendance are among the most consequential decisions made by young people. There is abundant evidence that high school students are often under-informed when making college-related decisions. This paper studies the diffusion of information across high-school cohorts about college programs and chances of admission, and its effects on students' application behavior. We find that a student's probability of applying to a particular college-major pair increases after the first applicant to that program from an older cohort in the student's high school. The probability of applying to a given program is doubled after an older-cohort student from the same high school first applies. Moreover, the effect is larger after the first older-cohort student who is admitted, and larger still after the first student who matriculates. These findings are consistent with students learning about the existence, characteristics, and admissions chances of various college programs from the experiences of their older-cohort peers.

“Effects of centralizing school admissions on education equality ” (with Lisa Botbol)

School socioeconomic segregation is prevalent in most countries, with disadvantaged students generally accessing low-quality schools. A common way to mitigate this issue is to implement affirmative actions giving some advantage to low-socioeconomic status (SES) students at school admissions. In this paper we study a reform implemented in Chile in 2016 that centralized applications to primary schools. It eliminates the possibility for schools to select students and it introduced priorities for low-SES students. First, we analyze the effects of this reform and the effectiveness of priorities for low-SES students. We use the sequential implementation of the reform to estimate its effects in a difference-in-differences framework. We find that the reform did not have the expected effect on the distribution of students across school types. Second, in order to investigate the factors explaining this lack of effectiveness, we estimate a demand model using the rank-order lists of students applications. We show that there is significant heterogeneity in preferences across SES types. In particular, low-SES students have preferences for schools with low-SES peers. This would explain why they do not benefit from the priorities they have for accessing good quality schools.

"Tuition, Peer Quality, and Competition on the College Market" (with J.F Houde, C. Fu)

In contexts where peer ability is an important component of the quality of a program, excess entry directly affect the quality of competitors. When institutions open programs that are close substitutes of existing programs, they force incumbent colleges to accept lower ability students, decreasing overall quality. In this paper, we aim at quantifying these externalities by studying competition and business stealing in the context of the Chilean higher-education market. Since 1990, the market has expanded significantly as the result of deregulation and the expansion of government loans and grant programs. This has intensified competition between institutions and rapidly increased enrollment. We develop and estimate a demand and supply model of education. Key in the model is the ability to capture substitutability between programs which depends on the level of spatial and quality differentiation between colleges. Additionally, it is crucial to capture the effect of peer ability on program quality. Our estimates show that students have strong preference for geographically close programs. There is significant dispersion on the preferences for peer ability, where high ability students have strong preferences for high-ability peers. Using these estimates, we calculate substitution patterns to see where students come from when a program increase its quality. We find significant substitution between middle tier programs, whereas top-tier universities tend to substitute mainly from other programs in that same range.

"Out-of-sector mobility and mismatches in the teacher labor market" (with Paul Diegert, Trude Gunnes, and Francois Poinas)

“Application and Matriculation Behavior in Higher-Education” (with E. Prager)

Other work (non-peer reviewed): 

Competition and the cannibalization of college quality (with Paola Bordon, Chao Fu, and Jean-Francois Houde). Book chapter for At a Crossroads: Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean. (Maria Marta Ferreyra, Botero Alvarez, Ciro Avitabile, Francisco Haimovich Paz and Sergio Urzua). Directions in Development. World Bank. 2017

Entry and Competition in the Market for Short-Cycle Programs (with Juan Esteban Carranza and Maria Marta Ferreyra). Book chapter for The Fast Track to New Skills: Short-Cycle Higher Education Programs in Latin America and the Caribbean (Maria Marta Ferreyra, Lelys Dinarte, Sergio Urzua, and Marina Bassi). World Bank. 2021