Research
Working Papers
``The value of information in centralized school choice systems’’. 2019. Reject and Resubmit at Journal of Political Economy.
Abstract: Strategy-proofness and assurance of a fair matching are desirable qualities for school choice mechanisms. Although these qualities are theoretical properties of the unrestricted-list deferred acceptance mechanism (DA), it has proven to be hard to go without list-size restrictions in practice. This paper shows how a simple modification to the restricted-list DA, in which students are provided more information about vacancies and offered higher-value options in the event of rejection, can mitigate uncertainty and yield matches very close to what would be obtained under the unrestricted-list DA. I estimate an application-portfolio choice model using administrative data from Tunisia, where a sequential implementation of the DA is used to assign high-school graduates to universities. This sequential implementation creates quasi-experimental variation that allows to separate the identification of students’ preferences for programs from their expectations about their admission probabilities. Counterfactual simulations show that the average student’s expected ex post utility is significantly lower when assignments are made using the standard restricted-list DA than what it would be in the unrestricted-list DA match. Using a sequential implementation, as is done in Tunisia, instead of the standard restricted-list DA, can reduce this welfare loss by 90%.
``On the Spatial Determinants of Educational Access’’. Joint with Francesco Agostinelli and Paolo Martellini. 2021.
Abstract: We define educational access as the component of a neighborhood's value that is determined by the set of schools available to its residents. This paper studies the extent to which educational access is determined by sorting based on heterogeneous preferences over school attributes, or local institutions that constrain residential location and school choice---such as school catchment areas and housing regulation. We develop a spatial equilibrium model of residential sorting and school choice, estimated using data from a large school district in the United States. The model replicates the responses of house prices and school enrollment to quasi-experimental variation in school peer composition and school transportation provision. We find that low-income families prioritize proximity to schools while high-income families and families with high-skilled children place more value on school peer composition. We use the model to evaluate how the geography of neighborhood sorting influences the aggregate and distributional outcomes of a school-choice expansion (place-based) and a housing voucher (people-based) policy. We find that both policies result in net welfare losses, with only marginal improvements in school peer composition for the average low-income family. Although eligible families benefit from these policies, the negative impact falls on families who currently invest in their children's education by residing in expensive neighborhoods. Under both policies, higher-income families are less exposed to the inflow of low-income children into their schools, either because of their longer distance from target neighborhoods or because of the cost imposed by residential zoning regulation on voucher recipients.
``Causal Effects in Matching Mechanisms with Strategically Reported Preferences’’. Joint with Marinho Bertanha and Ismaël Mourifié . 2023.
Abstract: A growing number of central authorities use assignment mechanisms to allocate students to schools in a way that reflects student preferences and school priorities. However, most real-world mechanisms give students an incentive to be strategic and misreport their preferences. In this paper, we provide an identification approach for causal effects of school assignment on future outcomes that accounts for strategic misreporting. Misreporting may invalidate existing point-identification approaches, and we derive sharp bounds for causal effects that are robust to strategic behavior. Our approach applies to any mechanism as long as there exist placement scores and cutoffs that characterize that mechanism's allocation rule. We use data from a deferred acceptance mechanism that assigns students to more than 1,000 university-major combinations in Chile. Students behave strategically because the mechanism in Chile constrains the number of majors that students submit in their preferences to eight options. Our methodology takes that into account and partially identifies the effect of changes in school assignment on various graduation outcomes.
``College Admission Mechanisms and the Opportunity Cost of Time’’. Joint with Olivier De Groote, Anaïs Fabre, and Arnaud Maurel. 2023.
Abstract: College admission platforms aim at achieving a balance between avoiding congestion and allowing for ex-post flexibility in students’ matches. The latter is crucial as the existence of off-platform options implies that some students will drop out of the platform in favor of their outside option, freeing up seats in on-platform programs. Sequential assignment procedures introduce such flexibility, by creating a dynamic trade-off for students: they can choose to delay their enrollment decision to receive a better offer later, at the cost of waiting before knowing their final admission outcome. We quantify this trade-off and its distributional consequences in a setting in which waiting costs can be heterogeneous across socio-economic groups. To do so, we use administrative data on rank-ordered lists and waiting decisions from the French college admission system to estimate a dynamic model of application decisions. We find that waiting costs are a key determinant of the timing of students’ acceptance decisions and of their final assignment. Nevertheless, we find substantial, but unequal, welfare gains from using a multi-round system.
Publications
``Do selective high schools improve students' outcomes? Evidence from Tunisia’’. Joint with Meryam Zaiem. Economics of Education Review, June 2024.
Abstract: This paper is concerned with identifying whether selective high schools may have an effect on students’ post-secondary trajectories and labor market prospects. It uses data from Tunisia, a country in which unemployment rates for post-secondary graduates are higher than for non-graduates, particularly for women —although there is significant variation across types of diplomas and fields of study. Our main finding is that admission to an elite high school raises students’ probability to eventually get assigned to a university program associated with a lower post-graduation unemployment rate. This is particularly true for women. Focusing then on students who would have applied to post-secondary programs regardless of admission to an elite high school, we show that this effect is the result of an increase in the competitiveness of their applications rather than of a change in their probability to apply to programs lower post-graduation unemployment rate.
Work in Progress
``Returns to Education in Mechanisms with Strategic Reporting and Imperfect Compliance: The Chilean Case ’’. Joint with Marinho Bertanha, Sebastián Gallegos, and Ismaël Mourifié. 2023.
``Peer Suspension Effects on Student Misbehavior'’. Joint with Ashley Schwanebeck and Maria Zhu. 2022.
``Peer Effects in Teacher Turnover'’. Joint with Ashley Schwanebeck and Maria Zhu. 2022.
``Educational inputs and timing: how do elite schools affect students' outcomes?’’. Joint with Meryam Zaiem. 2016.
Abstract: Documented in many papers, the impact of attending a school with high-performing peers on future achievement seem to vary greatly depending on the context. This heterogeneity calls for a better understanding of the mechanisms at play behind the effects of admission to an elite school on students' outcomes. Using data from selective high schools in Tunisia, we investigate two types of mechanisms: the change in educational inputs induced by admission to an elite school, and the timing of the intervention. To explore the first mechanism, we show that the effects of admission to an elite high school vary across the multiple Tunisian elite institutions, and we evaluate the link between the magnitude of the treatment effects on students' outcomes, and the intensity with which treatment modifies various dimensions of the school environment, such as school infrastructure and teacher and peer characteristics. Results suggest that, although average teachers' quality and student monitoring are increased by admission to an elite high school, the higher peer achievement seems to be the main mediator of treatment effects on students' outcomes. To assess the role of the timing of the intervention on the effectiveness of selective schools, we exploit a unique and recent feature of the Tunisian school system. Elite middle schools were created in 2007 by the Ministry of Education in Tunisia, using a similar prototype and selection process as for elite high schools. Data on the first cohort to enroll in these elite middle schools, graduating high school and applying to college in 2014, allow us to compare the effects on students' outcomes of admission to an elite middle school, to an elite high school, or possibly to both, one after the other. Results suggest that, in the Tunisian setting, the intervention had larger effects on students' outcome when performed at the high school level.