Current education reform proposals involve improving educational outcomes through forms of market-based competition and expanded parental choice. In this paper, we explore the impact of choice through open enrollment within the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Roughly half of the students within...

We estimate the longer-run effects of attending an effective high school (one that improves a combination of test scores, survey measures of socio-emotional development and behaviours in 9th-grade) for students who are more versus less educationally advantaged (i.e., likely to attain more years...

We model charter school entry and choice of educational practices. Student achievement depends on cognitive ability, motivation, effort, and match of school curriculum to ability. Exercising charter school autonomy over curriculum, to maximize achievement gains, the charter sets curriculum to...

In this paper, we examine whether expanded access to sought-after schools can improve academic achievement. The setting we study is the "open enrollment" system in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). We use lottery data to avoid the critical issue of non-random selection of students into schools....

An important goal of the desegregation of schools following the Supreme Court's decision in Brown vs. Board of Education was to improve the quality of the schools black children attended. This paper uses a new dataset to examine the effects of desegregation on public and private enrollment and...

Using administrative data on public school students in North Carolina, we find that sixth grade students attending middle schools are much more likely to be cited for discipline problems than those attending elementary school. That difference remains after adjusting for the socioeconomic and...

Peer effects have figured prominently in debates on school vouchers, desegregation, ability tracking and anti-poverty programs. Compelling evidence of their existence remains scarce for plaguing endogeneity issues such as selection bias and the reflection problem. This paper firmly establishes a...

Using data for North Carolina public school students in grades 3 to 8, we examine achievement gaps between white students and students from other racial and ethnic groups. We focus on successive cohorts of students who stay in the state's public schools for all six years, and study both...

We estimate peer effects for fourth graders in six European countries. The identification relies on variation across classes within schools. We argue that classes within primary schools are formed roughly randomly with respect to family background. Similar to previous studies, we find sizeable...

This paper uses the mass migration wave to Israel in the 1990s to examine the impact of immigrant concentration in elementary school on the long-term academic outcomes of native students in high school. To identify the causal effect of immigrant children on their peers, we exploit random...