Joint with Iftikhar Hussain
Studying a long-running nationwide system of school inspections, we provide real-world evidence about how parents' school choices respond to new information about school quality. We use exogenous variation in the timing of school inspections around the school choice deadline to identify the pure information effect on parents' school choices and eventual school enrollment. We find that low-income parents respond similarly to new information to their richer-counterparts. Conditional on household location, general information provision does not increase school segregation by household income.
Previously circulated as "Symmetric school choice patterns by income: evidence from nationwide school quality information"
Joint with Hélène Turon
Geographic school admissions criteria bind residential and school choices for parents, and could create externalities in equilibrium for non-parents through dis- placement or higher rent. Through a dynamic structural model, we show that the policy decision of geographic versus non-geographic school admissions criteria has important implications for school and housing markets. Geographic admissions criteria segregate schools but integrate neighborhoods according to income. Incorporating non-parents and older households into the model challenges the existing understanding of how schools affect the housing market: they face externalities from the geographic school admissions and their residential decisions dampen the equilibrium price premium around popular schools.
Joint with Jorge De la Roca and Petra Thiemann
In the US, test score gaps by socioeconomic status and race increase with city size. This paper examines to what extent residential sorting in the context of zoned schooling explains this fact. We combine 15 years of data on public elementary school students in North Carolina with geocoded school locations and proxy city size with the number of public elementary schools in a local labor market. Residential sorting increases with city size, which increases assortative matching between student advantage and school quality markedly. Assortative matching accounts for 10% of the city-size gradient in test score inequality.
Joint with Alberto Venturin
The established consensus from a large worldwide literature is that access to a 'better' school increases local property prices, which is typically interpreted as reflecting parents' demand for school quality. We show that this relationship does not hold universally. Replicating the boundary discontinuity design, which compares property prices on either side of a catchment area boundary, we show that the effect of access to the 'better' school are concentrated. Price premiums are large in the minority of areas where the difference in quality between schools across the boundary is large, but are not evident elsewhere. Exploring other dimensions of heterogeneity, we find that households are willing to pay to avoid schools at the bottom of the distribution, as well as reach the top. A sufficiently affluent school peer-group is a necessary condition for higher school test scores to raise prices.
It is a well-known empirical fact that access to a ‘good’ school causally increases local property prices. But who drives this demand, and how is neighbourhood composition ultimately affected? I estimate which households move to access a ‘good’ local school and when they move across the life-cycle, using longitudinal data and a difference-in-differences design. I find that price premia are driven by a minority of affluent households and are not dampened by older households moving away. This matters for the role of school admissions arrangements in neighbourhood formation, households’ welfare, and the general equilibrium effects of potential school choice reforms.