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 information on non-test score attributes 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.