Knocking it down and mixing it up: the impact of public housing regenerations (with Hector Blanco), The Review of Economics and Statistics, Accepted.
Media coverage: Nada es Gratis
Partly due to their negative effects on surrounding neighborhoods, some countries have been replacing distressed public housing developments with mixed-income housing. We study the impact of such policies on local housing markets in London, U.K., where several public housing developments were demolished and rebuilt while adding market-rate units on-site. We show that these ‘regenerations’ increase nearby house prices and rents, consistent with strong demand effects outweighing supply effects from additional market-rate housing in the immediate vicinity. We provide suggestive evidence that these effects are driven by regenerations removing an eyesore, attracting higher-income households, and reducing nearby crime.
School performance, score inflation and neighborhood development (with Erich Battistin), Journal of Labor Economics, 2024, Volume 42, Number 3.
Media coverage: Faculti, Maryland Today, Times Educational Supplement
We show that score inflation yields residential sorting around what households expect to be better schools, with long-term consequences on the economic geography of neighborhoods. We consider primary school exams in England, where grading standards have triggered an inflation of indicators in the national performance tables since the mid-1990s. Local neighborhoods were gentrified because of school improvements artificially signaled by score inflation. Competition between schools increased, yielding a real improvement in their quality. Effects of score inflation on house prices, deprivation and local economic activities are identifiable through to the present day.
Moving opportunities: the impact of mixed-income public housing regenerations on student achievement, Journal of Public Economics, 2024, Volume 230, 105053.
Winner of the Ezio Tarantelli Award of the Italian Association of Labour Economics (AIEL).
I use mixed-income public housing regenerations in London as a natural experiment to identify how schools affect low-income students’ educational achievement when affluent households flow into their neighborhood. I compare student achievement in schools in the same neighborhood located at different distances from a regeneration before and after its completion. I employ a grandfathering instrument for enrollment in treated schools to address potential endogenous mobility. Students exposed to regenerations have higher test scores at the end of primary school. I estimate that schools explain 65–81% of the overall achievement effects, which are mediated by changes in the student body’s composition.
Heterogeneous effects of school autonomy in England (with Elisabetta Pasini), Economics of Education Review, 2023, Volume 94, 102366.
Media coverage: Royal Economic Society Media Briefings, Lavoce.info
A 2010 education reform gave English schools the option to become academies, autonomous but state-funded schools. Academies can opt for two different models of governance by choosing to remain standalone schools or join an academy chain. We investigate the causal effect of the governance model on student achievement and school inputs. We find that students in academy chains have higher end-of-primary school test scores, with stronger effects for low achievers and early converter academies. School chains are more efficient than standalone academies, achieving better results while spending less overall. Survey data suggest that chains favor management changes, whereas standalone academies make changes related to educational practices.
The organizational economics of school chains (with Elisabetta Pasini and Olmo silva)
CEP Discussion Paper No. 1993, April 2024; IZA Discussion Paper No. 15442, July 2022
Reject & Resubmit, Economic Journal
We use the insights of the organizational economics of firms to study the organization of school chains. We match information on decentralization of activities for approximately 400 chains and 2,000 schools in England to student- and school-level administrative records. Chains with a larger share of schools whose leadership background is aligned with the chain expertise, younger chains, and chains close to the productivity frontier decentralize more. We also investigate the link between chain decentralization and average school performance – and find no significant association. This is consistent with the intuition that chains choose their organization in ways that maximize output (i.e., students’ learning), so the equilibrium relationship between performance and organizational set-up is flat. However, this finding masks important heterogeneities, with weaker schools within chains losing out from decentralization.
Should you Meet The Parents? The impact of qualitative information sessions on school choice (with Elisa Facchetti and Marco Ovidi)
SSRN WP 5172341, March 2025; CESifo Working Paper No. 10926, January 2024; IZA Discussion Paper No. 16064, April 2023
Revise & Resubmit, Journal of Human Resources
Understanding parental response to non-test score attributes is crucial to design effective school choice systems. We study an intervention providing parents with hard-to-find information on the school environment while holding information on school performance constant. The provision of this information decreases the outflow to private institutions by 17% and increases enrollment at local state schools, particularly among high-income and high-performing students. This intervention encourages parents to expand their state-school search without affecting their taste for academic performance, generating increased competition for schools with desirable attributes. These findings imply that simple, low-cost interventions may improve state schools’ finances and composition.
The Effects of Temporary Confiscation of Vacant Housing (with Josep Amer-Mestre)
High vacancy rates in tight housing markets are perceived by policymakers and society at large as a market failure that calls for government intervention. We study the effect of a policy passed in the Balearic Islands (Spain) that dictated the temporary confiscation of vacant properties, unless they are put on the market. Using a synthetic difference-in-differences strategy, we show that following the policy announcement, house prices increase while rents temporarily decrease before reverting back to pre-policy levels. This suggests that while supply effects dominate in the rental market, the sale market experiences an increase in prices. This is potentially due to a combination of an 'amenity effect' - i.e., the removal of the disamenity imposed by vacant properties on nearby housing - and a regulation effect, whereby imposing an implicit tax on vacant housing dampens private housing investments.
Neighborhood change and local economic activity (with Hector Blanco)
Draft available upon request.
The impact of gentrification on the economic opportunities of local residents is still unclear. We study how urban renewal programs affect the distribution of local firms and employment opportunities. We use the ‘regeneration’ of public housing developments in London (UK) into mixed-income housing as a natural experiment that increased the proportion of high-income households living in the affected neighborhoods. Over a nine-year period, we show that regenerations resulted in a spatial reshuffling of firms located within 1.2km from the site, without affecting their total number. Local firms experience an increase in employment of about 2-4%. Such increase is temporary, however, suggesting that housing regenerations did not generate persistent employment opportunities for incumbent residents.
Price responses to affordable housing under mandatory inclusionary zoning (with Hector Blanco)
Many housing assistance programs incentivize policies that involve a combination of affordable and market-rate units in the same building, i.e., mixed-income housing. Although prior research suggests that households in the private market are willing to pay to live in areas with higher-income neighbors, little is known about the magnitude of these preferences within a given building. This paper estimates the price response of market-rate units in mixed-income buildings to the share of affordable housing. We exploit variation from London’s mandatory inclusionary zoning program, under which new residential buildings are required to maintain a minimum amount of affordable housing set by each of the 33 city boroughs and that can vary on a case-by-case basis. Using an instrumental variables approach that leverages the discretionary part of the decision process, our preliminary results suggest that an increase in affordable housing in a mixed-income building significantly decreases the sale and rental prices of market-rate units in the same building.
Disruption in the Classroom
Many countries support the education of children with learning and behavioural difficulties in mainstream schools. However, there is little evidence on the effects of such inclusion policies on the academic achievement of targeted children and their classmates. I address this question by considering public schools in England, where a Maimonides' rule for class size formation yields quasi-experimental variation in the number of students with severe special educational needs (SEN). Instrumental variables estimates show no sizeable impact of the number of SEN students on the academic performance of their classmates. This result is not driven by additional resources that may be carried by SEN students, such as larger funding or additional teachers.