Job Market Paper
Equilibrium Effects of Neighborhood Schools
with Clemence Idoux
Many public school districts allow families to enroll in schools outside their neighborhood. At the cost of higher transportation spending, choice programs aim to decouple educational opportunity from residential geography. This paper evaluates the impact of a return to neighborhood-based assignment resulting from Seattle's re-introduction of neighborhood schools in 2010. We quantify the aggregate and distributional consequences of neighborhood assignment using an equilibrium model of joint residential and enrollment choices. We estimate that household relocation mitigates roughly half of the aggregate welfare loss that would occur if household locations were held fixed. Housing cost reductions for low-income renters fully offset welfare losses due to restricted choice. Neighborhood assignment does not appear to have increased racial segregation or reduced the quality of schools attended by low-income families.
Work in Progress
The Cost of Choice: Public School Choice and Segregation
Public school choice policies are often promoted as tools for integration, yet their effects on segregation are strongly debated. This project combines theory and evidence to show that choice can deepen segregation even when families prefer the same schools. Using a stylized model of residential and school choice I show that when attending a non-neighborhood school carries a cost, choice can exacerbate segregation despite uniform preferences. I corroborate this prediction using administrative student data on applications and enrollments from Seattle and New York City. In both cities, white and Asian families disproportionately opt out of neighborhood schools in areas zoned to predominantly minority schools. Counterfactual analysis suggests that a return to neighborhood assignment would integrate elementary schools in both cities. Leveraging variation across New York City's 32 community school districts, I demonstrate that the effect of choice on segregation turns on the spatial configuration of residential segregation: choice integrates schools only in districts where minority and majority households live in close geographic proximity.
Private Scholarships: Access and Impact
with Joshua Angrist, Maggie Liu, Jack Mountjoy, and Andrew Whitten
Private scholarship programs are a substantial source of college financial aid, but the impacts of these programs have not been rigorously evaluated. This project evaluates the impacts of over 100 unique programs that collectively awarded a total of over a quarter of a billion dollars through Scholarship America, the nation’s largest distributor of private scholarships. To identify causal impacts, we leverage detailed data on scholarship applications and qualification cutoffs used by Scholarship America to assign awards to applicants. By linking applicants to administrative data on college enrollments and tax returns, this work will provide the first large-scale causal evidence on whether private scholarships effectively expand college opportunity and economic mobility.