Research
Research
Working Papers
"The End of One Exam: Centralized Assignment Reform, Student Choice, and School Quality," with Victor Delgado and Jintao Sun.
[Job Market Paper]
Abstact: This paper studies how centralized assignment rules shape student placement and school quality. We examine Mexico’s 2025 reform, which replaced exam-based assignment for non-elite schools with a two-list mechanism. Using administrative applicant data and standardized test records, we estimate school value-added as a measure of quality and build a structural model of school demand and supply. On the demand side, we model students’ school choices and estimate preference parameters under the Stability assumption. On the supply side, schools determine their quality level by trading off enrollment incentives and direct returns to quality against their associated costs. Estimates show students prefer high quality schools. Non-elite schools improve quality only in response to enrollment incentives. In contrast, elite schools respond to both enrollment incentives and direct benefits from providing higher quality. Counterfactuals show that the new system shifts high achievers to non-elite schools; however, it also increases the number of unassigned students. The new system changes school quality, with value-added falling at elite schools and rising at non-elite schools. Yet elite schools continue outperforming non-elite schools. Expanding non-elite capacity reduces unassigned students without altering these effects. This paper highlights both the equity gains and the capacity challenges of the reform.
"An Evaluation of the Alief Independent School District Jump Start Program: Using a Model to Recover Mechanisms from an RCT,'' with Flávio Cunha, Qinyou Hu, Andrea Salvati, and Kenneth I. Wolpin [NBER WP \#33537].
Second Round Revise and Resubmit, Journal of Political Economy
Abstract: This paper evaluates the Jumpstart Program (JSP), a parenting intervention implemented by a school district in the Houston area to enhance school readiness among economically disadvantaged three-year-old children. Unlike many early childhood programs typically tested in controlled research settings, JSP leverages existing school district resources for scalability and practical application. We conducted a three-year randomized controlled trial to measure the program’s impact on child cognitive outcomes, parental engagement, and mechanisms of change. The results indicate improvements in children’s performance on curriculum-aligned assessments and modest gains in general cognitive readiness as measured by the Bracken School Readiness Assessment. Furthermore, treatment group parents demonstrated increased reading frequency with their children, underscoring enhanced parental involvement as a crucial mechanism behind the program’s success. We employed a structural model to analyze both the direct effects of JSP and its indirect effects through changes in the marginal productivity of investments or preferences via habit formation. Our analysis concludes that 75% of the program’s impact is attributed to direct effects, while 25% is mediated through changes in habit formation in parental investments. Our research underscores the potential of scalable, real-world interventions to bridge socio-economic gaps in early childhood development and inform the design of effective educational policies.
"Spatial Inequality and High School Choice: Implications from Mexico City," with Victor Delgado and Jintao Sun.
Abstact: The uneven spatial distribution of schools hinders high-achieving students, particularly the socioeconomically disadvantaged, from accessing elite educational resources because of long commutes and associated costs. We study this problem within the context of COMIPEMS, a centralized system of public high school admissions in Mexico City’s metropolitan area. We estimate student preferences by assuming that the observed matching is stable in the equilibrium. Our preference estimates show that students face a quality-proximity trade-off which is heterogeneous by program track (academic versus non-academic). Counterfactual distance-based subsidies would significantly increase high-achieving students’ admission to elite programs, especially in the academic track. In contrast, prioritization policies alone have negligible effects on assignment outcomes without addressing the demand side or locations of supply. Our findings call for increasing the supply of elite programs in remote places within this centralized assignment system.
Work in Progress
"The Cost of Education: Examining How Tuition Fees Shape Students' Choice in University Admissions," with Georgy Artemov, Yeon-Koo Che, and YingHua He.
"School Choice with Latent Accessibility Constraints: Insights from Mexico City,'' with Victor Delgado and Jintao Sun.
"Is Universal Scholarship Good for Everyone? The Role of Cash Transfers on School Choice," with Victor Delgado and Jiewen Luo.
"Examining the Impact of Housing Vouchers on Educational Choices,'' with Jeremy Fiel, Hojung Lee, Jiaxin Li, and Anna Rhodes.
"The Causal Effects of Housing Vouchers on Educational Outcomes in a Unique Legal Environment: Evidence from Texas," with Jeremy Fiel, Hojung Lee, Jiaxin Li, and Anna Rhodes.
"On The Measurement of Investments: Adult-Child Verbal Interactions" with Flávio Cunha, Qinyou Hu, and Kenneth I. Wolpin.
"Coordinated Admissions for Early Childhood: Evidence from New Orleans," with Douglas Harris.