We examine whether low-skilled immigration to the United States has contributed to immigrants' residential isolation by reducing native demand for public schools. We address endogeneity in school demographics using established Mexican settlement patterns in California and use a comparison group...

This paper examines the effect of peers on an individual's likelihood of retirement using an administrative dataset of all retirement-eligible Los Angeles teachers for the years 1998-2001. We use two large unexpected pension reforms that differentially impacted financial incentives within and...

Gale-Shapley's deferred acceptance (henceforth DA) mechanism has emerged as a prominent candidate for placing students to public schools. While DA has desirable fairness and incentive properties, it limits the applicants' abilities to communicate their preference intensities, which entails ex...

El desarrollo y consolidación de las nuevas tecnologías de la información y la comunicación (TIC) ha dado paso a la denominada sociedad del conocimiento. La vieja discusión sobre el acceso al desarrollo de las regiones menos favorecidas por la Revolución Industrial ha quedado obsoleta por...

In response to three Supreme Court rulings in the early 1990s, numerous court-ordered desegregation plans have been terminated. Using a unique dataset and an event study research design, this paper explores the impact of these terminations. The results suggest that termination produces a...

We study competition between two publicly funded school systems in Ontario, Canada: one that is open to all students, and one that is restricted to children of Catholic backgrounds. A simple model of competition between the competing systems predicts greater effort by school managers in areas...

In the fall of 2007, New York City began using student tests and other measures to assign each school a grade (A to F), and linked grades to rewards and consequences, including possible school closure. These grades were released in late September, arguably too late for schools to make major...

This paper uses data from three prominent exam high schools in New York City to estimate the impact of attending a school with high-achieving peers on college enrollment and graduation. Our identification strategy exploits sharp discontinuities in the admissions process. Applicants just eligible...

Conditional on enrollment, African American students are substantially less likely to graduate from four-year public universities than white students. Using administrative micro-data from Missouri, we decompose the graduation gap into racial differences in four factors: (i) how students sort to...