Lottery estimates suggest oversubscribed urban charter schools boost student achievement markedly. But these estimates needn't capture treatment effects for students who haven't applied to charter schools or for students attending charters for which demand is weak. This paper reports estimates...

A growing number of school districts use centralized assignment mechanisms to allocate school seats in a manner that reflects student preferences and school priorities. Many of these assignment schemes use lotteries to ration seats when schools are oversubscribed. The resulting random assignment...

Countries and cities around the world increasingly rely on centralized systems to assign students to schools. Two algorithms, deferred acceptance (DA) and immediate acceptance (IA), are widespread. The latter is often criticized for harming disadvantaged families who fail to get access to...

In 2005, the U.S. Congress legislated that the H-1B visa program create 20,000 annual slots reserved for advanced-degree applicants. Since then, the U.S. Customs and Immigration Service (USCIS) has used visa allocation rules that comply with this legislation. Following a directive in the April...

We use admissions lotteries to estimate the effects of large-scale public preschool in Boston on college-going, college preparation, standardized test scores, and behavioral outcomes. Preschool enrollment boosts college attendance, as well as SAT test-taking and high school graduation. Preschool...

In July 2002, FINRA began mandatory dissemination of price and volume information for corporate bond trades. This paper, using recently released data, measures transparency's effect on trading activity and costs for the entire corporate bond market. Even though trading costs decrease...