Working Papers
"A Dynamic Framework of School Choice: Effects of Middle Schools on High School Choice", (with Dong Woo Hahm) New Draft
Abstract: We study the dynamic relationship of school choices across different educational stages. Using quasi-random middle school assignments in New York City, we show that middle schools with top quality-review scores cause students to be matched to higher-achievement high schools, in both level and value-added. A decomposition exercise using a sequential model of middle and high school choices shows that the middle school effect on students’ applications, relative to that on high school admissions, is four times more important in explaining the middle school’s total effect on high school match. By mainly changing students’ high school application, counterfactual middle school admissions reforms not only increase the overall achievement level of the high schools students attend but also narrow the racial or income disparities in it. Such efficiency and equity gains from middle school reforms increase by up to 50% when combined with similar high school admissions reforms.
"Location Choice, Commuting, and School Choice", (with Dong Woo Hahm)
Abstract: We explore the impact of public school assignment reforms by building a households’ school choice model with two key features---(1) endogenous residential location choice and (2) opt-out to outside schooling options. Households decide where to live taking into account that locations determine access to schools---admissions probabilities and commuting distances to schools. Households are heterogeneous both in observed and unobserved characteristics. We estimate the model using administrative data from New York City's middle school choice system. Variation from a boundary discontinuity design separately identifies access-to-school preferences from other location amenities. Residential sorting based on access-to-school preference explains 30% of the gap in test scores of schools attended by minority students versus their peers. If households' residential locations were fixed, a reform that introduces purely lottery-based admissions to schools in lower- and mid-Manhattan would reduce the cross-racial gap by 7%. However, households’ endogenous location choices dampen the effect by half.
"The Effect of Capital Gains Taxes on Business Creation and Employment: The Case of Opportunity Zones", (with Alina Arefeva, Andra Ghent, and Morris Davis) Conditionally Accepted to Management Science
Abstract: The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 established a new program called Opportunity Zones (OZs) that reduces or eliminates capital gains taxes on investment in a limited number of low-income Census tracts. We provide a model illustrating how a change in capital taxation affects employment in existing and new establishments. We then use establishment-level data to show that, in its first two years, the OZ designation increased employment growth relative to comparable tracts by between 3.0 and 4.5 percentage points in metropolitan areas. The job growth occurred in multiple industries and persisted into 2021 rather than quickly disappearing. However, most of the jobs created by the program were likely taken by residents that live outside of the designated tracts, consistent with only 5% of US residents working in the same Census tract as the one in which they live.
Publications
"Making College Affordable? The Impacts of Tuition Freezes and Caps" (with Lois Miller), Economics of Education Review 85 (2022) 102265
Abstract: We study how colleges' ``sticker price'' and institutional financial aid change during and after tuition caps and freezes using a modified event study design. While tuition regulations lower sticker prices, colleges recoup losses by lowering financial aid or rapidly increasing tuition after regulations end. At four-year colleges, regulations lower sticker price by 6.3 percentage points while simultaneously reducing aid by nearly twice as much (11.3 percentage points). At two-year colleges, while regulations lower tuition by 9.3 percentage points, the effect disappears within three years of the end of the regulation. Changes in net tuition vary widely; focusing on four-year colleges, while some students receive discounts up to 5.9 percentage points, others pay 3.8 percentage points more than they would have without these regulations. Students who receive financial aid, enter college right after the regulation is lifted, or attend colleges that are more dependent on tuition benefit less.
Work in Progress
"Information, Match Quality, and the Design of Student-School Assignment Mechanisms" (with Chao Fu and Dong Woo Hahm)
Pre Doctoral Work
"Do Teaching Practices Matter for Cooperation?" (with Syngjoo Choi, Booyuel Kim, and Yoonsoo Park), Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 2021, 93, 101703