We study the effect of different school choice mechanisms on schools' incentives for quality improvement. To do so, we introduce the following criterion: A mechanism respects improvements of school quality if each school becomes weakly better off whenever that school becomes more preferred by...

Many centralized school admissions systems use lotteries to ration limited seats at oversubscribed schools. The resulting random assignment is used by empirical researchers to identify the effect of entering a school on outcomes like test scores. I first find that the two most popular empirical...

Centralized matching markets are designed assuming that participants make well-informed choices upfront. However, this paper uses data from NYC's school choice system to show that families' choices change after the initial match as they learn about schools. I develop an empirical model of...

Atmospheric pollution was an important side effect of coal-fired industrialisation in the nineteenth century. In Britain emissions of black smoke were on the order of fifty times as high as they were a century later. In this paper we examine the effects of these emissions on child development by...

We study the effect of different centralized public school choice mechanisms on schools’ incentives for quality improvement. To do so, we introduce the following criterion: A mechanism respects improvements of school quality if each school becomes weakly better off whenever that school...

We consider the many-to-many two-sided matching problem under a stringent domain restriction on preferences called the max-min criterion. We show that, even under this restriction, there is no stable mechanism that is weakly Pareto efficient, strategy-proof, or monotonic (i.e. respects...