Research Projects

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 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 predicted 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 movers, that is driven by boys and students from low socioeconomic status (SES). These effects are consistent with a strong decrease in disruption that outweighs other potential negative effects. Crucially, the probability of dropping out also decreases for receivers, with a stronger effect on low-SES students. These results are consistent with small disruption effects for receivers that are outweighed by positive ranking effects. Importantly, for high-SES receivers, I find a moderate “rich flight” toward the private system. I show that, contrary to changes in classmates' characteristics, changes in class size cannot explain the results.

• 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.

• New Ongoing RCT: "Parental meta-cognitive strategies and educational achievement of children from socially disadvantaged families: evidence from a text-messaging intervention", C. Barone, G. Borst, N. Guyon, and E. Huillery, Ongoing RCT (started in Sept. 2021)

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.

• NB: The first RCT on which the REStud paper is based studies the effect of the parental involvement program, while the 2nd RCT studies techniques to increase take-up of this program.

• • • Paper: "Biased Aspirations and Social Inequality at School: Evidence from French Teenagers", Nina Guyon and Elise Huillery, The Economic Journal, 2021, Vol. 131 (634), pp. 525–540, https://doi.org/10.1093/ej/ueaa077. View [published version]

Abstract: Socially disadvantaged students are less likely to aspire to the top educational pathways than their advantaged classmates who have the same test scores. We identify two behavioural biases that explain most of this gap: socially disadvantaged students are less aware of the top educational pathways and underestimate their academic ability relative to their advantaged peers. We also find that lower educational aspirations at a point in time are associated with poorer school outcomes later on, after controlling for many important factors. Debiasing aspirations through information campaigns and self-esteem building programmes could thus help reduce social inequality in educational attainment. 

• • • • 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.