Research

Job market paper

Student Preferences and Horizontal Differentiation in Urban School Choice Markets. Draft

Many urban public school systems in the United States allow families to pick among schools with different academic themes. For example, New York City students can choose to attend high schools focused on topics as varied as health sciences, journalism, and performing arts. In this paper, I investigate the impact of curricular themes on segregation and student outcomes in New York City high schools. I estimate a structural model using data on student applications to determine how families trade off curricular themes and other school characteristics in the application process. I find that all demographic groups, but particularly white and Asian applicants, tend to prefer Humanities and Interdisciplinary programs, the most general curricular theme, to more specialized themes. Using the model to compare the baseline assignment to a simulated counterfactual assignment in which all programs are Humanities and Interdisciplinary, I find that curricular differentiation slightly increases racial segregation across high school programs. On average, students prefer their counterfactual assignment, but a substantial minority of applicants, including about half of all Black applicants, would be worse off without curricular differentiation. Finally, to provide a more complete picture of the trade-offs involved in offering curricular differentiation, I use quasi-experimental variation generated by the assignment mechanism to estimate theme enrollment effects. I find that theme matters for high school outcomes and postsecondary choice, but effects do not vary by theme preference, suggesting limited scope for themes to improve student-school match quality.

Publications

The Power of Certainty: Experimental Evidence on the Effective Design of Free Tuition Programs (with Elizabeth Burland, Susan Dynarski, Katherine Michelmore, and Stephanie Owen). Published in American Economic Review: Insights.

Proposed “free college” policies vary widely in design. The simplest set tuition to zero for everyone. More targeted approaches limit free tuition to those who demonstrate need through an application process. We experimentally test the effects of these two models on the schooling decisions of low-income students. An unconditional free tuition offer from a large public university substantially increases application and enrollment rates. A free tuition offer contingent on proof of need has a much smaller effect on application and none on enrollment. These results are consistent with students placing a high value on financial certainty when making schooling decisions.

Works in progress

The Distributional Effects of State Investments in Less-Selective Public Colleges (with John Bound, Soyoung Han, and Andrew Simon)

Multidimensional Impacts of High School Teachers on Students (with Maria Knoth Humlum and Helena Skyt Nielsen)