Research

Although social housing is prevalent in many developed countries, there is no consensus over how to design allocation rules. Measuring the impact of a change in rules requires predicting how applicants will respond. In a context where rents are fixed, application data scarce, and allocation rules lack transparency, disentangling an applicant preferences from their probability to receive an offer is challenging.  This paper develops a dynamic framework which makes use of a novel, comprehensive dataset of French social housing applications to separately identify preferences of applicants to social housing from their expectations over future offers and the allocation rules. This allows to compare the welfare impact of changes in the allocation rules. Results indicate that the current system favors households with French nationality, and disadvantages precarious households like single mothers compared to the rest of the population. Counterfactual analysis suggests removing the dependence of allocation rules on waiting time would improve welfare.

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 action policies favoring low-socioeconomic status students at school admissions. In this paper, we study a Chilean reform from 2016 that centralized applications to primary schools. It eliminated the possibility for schools to select students and it introduced priorities for low-SES students.  We first analyze the effects of this reform on education inequalities by using the sequential implementation of the reform to estimate its effects in a difference-in-differences framework. As we find that the reform did not generate the expected changes in school segregation, we deepen the analysis and estimate a demand model using the rank-ordered lists of students’ applications. We show that there is significant heterogeneity in preferences across SES types. Specifically, high-SES students have stronger preferences for schools with less low-SES peers. This could explain why low-SES students do not seem to make much use of the advantages at selection brought by the reform, even in the counterfactual scenario where affirmative action is increased.