Public schooling in the U.S. has numerous critics, many of whom suggest that alternatives such as providing vouchers for private schools may be more effective. This paper combines decennial census and American Community Survey data for various years to examine the relationship between...

Using unique data from Pakistan we estimate a model of demand for differentiated products in 112 rural education markets with significant choice among public and private schools. Our model accounts for the endogeneity of school fees and the characteristics of students attending the school. As...

Native children switch from public to private primary schools in response to increased refugee concentration in the Turkish public education system. 10 percentage-point increase in refugee-to-population ratio generates, on average, 0.16 percentage-point increase in private primary school...

This paper uses a rich set of student background characteristics, including early measures of cognitive and non-cognitive skills, to estimate the value added of second-level schools in Ireland. Although there are high performing schools in both raw and value-added terms, there is a considerable...

We study how a large household windfall affects sorting of relatively disadvantaged youth over high school tracks by exploiting the discontinuity in the assignment of a welfare program in Mexico. The in-cash transfer is found to significantly increase the probability of selecting vocational...

We design and implement a field experiment that provides students from less advantaged backgrounds with individualized feedback on academic performance during the transition from middle to high school. The intervention reduces the gap between expected and actual performance, as well as shrinks...

Theory points to a potential trade-off between two main school assignment mechanisms; Boston and Deferred Acceptance (DA). While DA is strategy-proof and gives a stable matching, Boston might outperform DA in terms of ex-ante efficiency. We quantify the (dis)advantages of the mechanisms by using...

School choice may allow schools to impede access to students perceived as costlier to educate. To test this, we sent emails from fictitious parents to 6,452 charter schools and traditional public schools subject to school choice in 29 states and Washington, D.C. The fictitious parent asked...

Schools vary in quality, and high-performing schools tend to be oversubscribed: there are more applicants than places available. In this paper, we use nationally representative cohort data linked to administrative education records to study the consequences of failing to gain admission to one's...

This paper examines the effects of student ability on teacher turnover using data from Stockholm high schools and an admission reform that led to the exogenous reshuffling of pupils. The results indicate that a 10-percentile-point increase in student credentials decreases the probability of a...