Should you Meet The Parents? The impact of qualitative information sessions on school choice (with Elisa Facchetti and Marco Ovidi), Journal of Human Resources, Accepted.
SSRN WP 5172341, March 2025
[Previous versions: CESifo Working Paper No. 10926, January 2024; IZA Discussion Paper No. 16064, April 2023]
Understanding parental responses to non-test score attributes is crucial to designing effective school choice systems. We study the impact on parental school choice of qualitative information sessions that mainly offer information about school attributes other than test scores. The outflow to private education is reduced by 17%, with larger responses among relatively advantaged students. Parents respond by increasing takeup of state school offers, intensifying competition for seats at oversubscribed schools. The intervention does not affect parental demand for measurable school attributes. We conclude that low-cost interventions providing qualitative information can improve state schools’ finances and peer quality.
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: GLA Housing, 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.
Neighborhood change and local economic activity (with Hector Blanco)
RF Berlin Discussion Paper 209/26 / CESifo WP 12891, July 2026
We study how neighborhood change shapes local business demographics and employment. We use the regeneration of London public housing into mixed-income housing as a natural experiment that led to a large influx of more affluent households. In a difference-in-differences design comparing nearby businesses to those located farther away, we find that regenerations shift business composition – in both counts and employment – away from small local shops and toward larger general retail establishments and dining services that cater to the new residents. While we find no effect on total local employment on average, employment does increase in the areas most disadvantaged at baseline, suggesting that neighborhood change can expand local employment opportunities in these areas.
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
Revise & 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.
Skin in the Game (with Erich Battistin and Michele De Nadai)
In fantasy sports, participants manage virtual teams of real-life athletes under a shared set of rules. We focus on Fantasy Premier League (FPL), the world’s most popular online fantasy football game, to study if the race of athletes, proxied by their skin tone, affects manager decisions. This low-stakes, anonymous setting provides a unique environment to test for discrimination: fantasy managers form rosters through non-rivalrous choices in one global market with common player prices and budget constraints, facing minimal strategic disadvantages from potential biases. The app features an intuitive interface that prominently displays player photographs alongside a wealth of performance statistics. Simple and transparent rules make player productivity observable and quantifiable to managers. Using an administrative panel of 8 million managers worldwide, we develop a structural model of manager decision-making grounded in expected payoff maximization and incorporating manager-specific preferences, subjective beliefs about player performance, and collective demand factors. We estimate the model using data on manager choices, player performance, and player skin tone, which we measure from a machine learning algorithm that converts photographs into quantifiable skin color classifications.
Closing the Books: Public Library Closures and Adult Cognitive and Health Outcomes (with Agnese Romiti)
Libraries serve as learning hubs and gathering spaces. As several countries experience rising social isolation and political disengagement, understanding libraries' role is essential for public policy, especially in an ageing society where isolation impacts cognitive health for the elderly. Using a Difference-in-Differences design, we study how public library closures in England affect cognitive and health outcomes of adult individuals. In provisional results, we document that adult individuals experiencing a library closure in their neighbourhood exhibit lower cognitive and health outcomes following the closure.
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.
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.