How much do schools differ in their effectiveness? Recent studies that seek to answer this question account for student sorting using random assignment generated by central allocation mechanisms or oversubscribed schools. However, the resulting estimates, while causal, may also reflect peer...

We study the welfare produced by a coordinated school assignment system that is based exclusively on minimizing distance to schools, comparing the matches it produces to a system that includes household preferences using a deferred acceptance algorithm. We leverage administrative data and a...

This paper studies school choice and information in the context of education markets in rural Haiti. Using a market level randomized control trial, we evaluate the aggregate effect of providing test score information on subsequent test scores, prices, and enrollment. After the intervention, we...

This paper uses a natural policy experiment to estimate how changes in the costs of engaging in criminal activity may influence adolescents’ decisions in crime participation and school attendance. The study finds that, after an exogenous decrease in the severity of judicial punishment imposed...

Using administrative data from the urban Mexican Oportunidades program, this paper analyzes why poor households choose less education for their children, even when offered financial compensation for school attendance. Each school year, half of recipients forgo income for which they are eligible...

Many nations allow private entities to manage publicly funded schools and grant them greater flexibility than traditional public schools. However, isolating the causal effect of attending these privately managed public schools relative to attending traditional public schools is difficult because...

The tracking of pupils by ability into elite and non-elite schools represents a controversial policy in many countries. There is no consensus on how large the elite track should be and little agreement on the effects of any further increase in its size. This paper presents a natural experiment...

Expanding parental choice in education may increase system-wide productivity if parents select schools that form a specifically good match with their children. I investigate the effect of attending a preferred school on student achievement in London primary schools. I exploit as good as random...

This paper designs and implements 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...

The literature on school choice assumes that families can submit a preference list over all the schools they want to be assigned to. However, in many real-life instances families are only allowed to submit a list containing a limited number of schools. Subjects' incentives are drastically...