Price Staggering in Cartels (with Heiko Gerlach) - International Journal of Industrial Organization
The Effects of the New Orleans Charter-Bassed School Reform on Crime (with Stephen Barnes and Douglas Harris)
Hurricane Katrina, in addition to being one of the nation’s worst natural disasters, triggered various policy changes in New Orleans, including extensive market-based school reforms which turned the city into an almost all-charter school district. We provide some of the first evidence on the effects of these combined events on the rate of criminal convictions of students who attended New Orleans public schools before and after the storm. Using the synthetic control group method and a unique student-level longitudinal statewide data set from Louisiana, we find that Katrina reduced conviction rates for students who returned to New Orleans over a long horizon of more than a decade. We also adapt the synthetic control method in the spirit of a triple-difference approach to test whether school reform was a key mechanism. Using the ratio of the conviction rates between these returnees and young adults in the same districts aged 25-34 to account for non-school factors, we find that the school reforms were likely the main driver of these crime reductions.
Predicting the Effect of Affirmative Action Plans in New York City Elite Public High Schools
In recent years, there have been concerns about the lack of diversity in schools, especially elite schools that select students based on exams. This paper studies the impact of two possible affirmative action plans in New York City by estimating students' underlying preferences and then simulating their actions under the two proposed plans. There is a trade-off between promoting diversity and maintaining student quality in elite schools. A tier-based plan similar to that in Chicago does little to increase the overall racial diversity of this sector, but it preserves the quality of incoming students. In contrast, a plan to guarantee elite school seats to students who placed in the top seven percent (by academic performance) of each public middle school causes substantial exchanges of students between the elite and regular sectors, thereby giving more access to Black and Hispanic students at the cost of lower student quality. The two plans also change the distribution of diversity across schools in different ways. The Chicago plan reduces the differences among schools within the elite sector, while the Top 7% plan bridges the gap in diversity between the two sectors even as it increases within-sector dispersion. Both plans result in considerable changes in school assignments in the regular school sector.
Matching and Learning – An Experimental Study (with Guillaume Haeringer and Silvio Ravaioli)
We use a lab experiment to study the patterns and effects of learning in two classic centralized matching mechanisms widely used in school choice and other real-world settings. We focus on the Deferred Acceptance algorithm (DA, strategyproof but not efficient) and contrast it with the Immediate Acceptance algorithm (IA, efficient but not strategyproof). Each matching problem (round) is repeated for several periods: after being informed about the match outcome of the previous period, subjects are asked again the order in which they would apply to the same schools. Each participant experiences multiple rounds of the same mechanism. Our design allows for two types of learning: to coordinate within the same environment (within round) as well as to understand the underlying mechanisms (across rounds). We observe that subjects are more truthful under the DA mechanism and achieve higher payoffs under the IA mechanism. We provide additional evidence to previous work that the majority of the deviations from truth-telling in DA do not affect payoffs. Furthermore, by explicitly analyzing learning, we can confirm that at least some of the participants learn about the optimality of truth-telling, and their departures from it happen primarily when the same environment is repeated. Finally, we find that when learning to coordinate, agents tend to retain their previous strategy when the payoff from this strategy is high, which is suggestive of reinforcement learning.
The Effects of Charter Renewal Policy on School Choice and Student Outcomes
Does Preparation for the Entrance Examination Matter for Performance in College? Evidence from Vietnam