Research

Working Papers

Perceived Ability and School Choices: Experimental Evidence and Scale-up Effects, with Matteo Bobba and Veronica Frisancho, 2024

This paper explores an information intervention designed and implemented within a school assignment mechanism in Mexico City. Through a randomized experiment, we show that providing a subset of applicants with feedback about their academic performance can enhance sorting by skill across high school tracks. This reallocation effect results in higher completion rates three years post-assignment. We further integrate the experimental evaluation into an empirical model of school choice and educational outcomes to assess the impact of the intervention for the overall population of applicants. Information provision is shown to increase the ex-ante efficiency of the student-school allocation, while congestion externalities are detrimental for the equity of education outcomes.

School Choice, Skill Measures, and Graduation, with Maria Elena Ortega-Hesles, 2024

This paper studies the effects of using both one-shot exam scores and GPAs to construct the priority order of a centralized education market. We use data from Mexico City, where seat rationing relies solely on a one-shot exam score. We first show that marginal admission to the most over-subscribed high schools decreases graduation for students with low GPAs and boys and has no effect for students with high GPAs and girls. We then study the effects of counterfactual priority orders that combine the one-shot exam score and GPA with different weights. The larger the weight on GPA, the larger the share of girls and low-SES students that get access to the most over-subscribed schools. However, using roughly equal weight on both skill measures maximizes the treatment effects on graduation.

Time Varying Effects of Elite Schools:  Evidence from Mexico City, with Salvador Navarro, 2024

We study whether the academic effects of being marginally admitted to an elite science school depend on the admission year, as a reflection of how school characteristics are changing over time. For our analysis, we take advantage of five years (2005-2009) of administrative data on a large centralized high school admission system. We find that the effect on mathematics test scores at the end of high school decreases each year, starting positive and statistically significant in 2005 and ending not significant by 2009. We show that the discontinuous jumps in peer quality and other school inputs induced by elite school admission have not systematically changed over time. However, elite schools’ value-added decreased, while non-elite schools’ value-added increased, affecting the treatment definition. Varying relative school quality limits the external validity of otherwise internally valid estimates.