Publications
Perceived Ability and School Choices: Experimental Evidence and Scale-up Effects, with Matteo Bobba and Veronica Frisancho, 2026
Accepted at Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics
Featured in: VoxDev
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, 2026
Accepted at Quantitative Economics
Featured in: Fordham Institute
This paper studies the effects of combining skill measures 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 admission to the most over-subscribed schools decreases graduation for marginally admitted students, but this effect is heterogeneous. It is decreasing in the one-shot exam for inframarginal students. It is negative for marginal students with low GPAs and boys but null for marginal students with high GPAs and girls. We then use a model of school choice and graduation that allows for match effects to study the equity and efficiency 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 girls' and low-SES students' graduation rates at these schools.
Working Papers
Time Varying Effects of Elite Schools: Evidence from Mexico City, with Salvador Navarro, 2026
R&R at Labour Economics
We examine whether the academic effects of marginal admission to elite science high schools vary by admission year, reflecting changes in school quality over time. Using administrative data from Mexico City’s centralized high school admission system between 2005 and 2009, we estimate year-specific regression discontinuity designs. We find that the effect on end-of-high-school math test scores declines steadily over the period—positive and significant in 2005, but statistically insignificant by 2009. This decline is not explained by changes in peer quality or other observable school inputs, which remain stable. Instead, we document a reduction in the value-added of elite schools, suggesting that changes in the productivity of school inputs drive the trend. Our findings highlight the time-specific nature of treatment effects and the limits of external validity, even in internally valid designs.
Constrained School Choice and the Demand for Effective Schools, with Diether Beuermann, 2026
Choosing a school is one of the most important decisions parents make regarding their children’s human capital, yet parents often cannot freely choose among schools. We study preferences for school effectiveness and peer quality in the centralized secondary school market of Barbados, where admissions are based on a one-shot exam and parents face a binding cap on the number of schools they can list. Exploiting a policy reform that further tightened this cap, we show that parents respond by omitting the most selective schools from their applications, consistent with parents "skipping the impossible" by omitting schools they perceive as unattainable. We then estimate preferences for school effectiveness, measured by impacts on test scores and adult wages, and peer quality under alternative assumptions. Assuming that applications reveal parents' most preferred schools (i.e., truth-telling), we find no valuation of effectiveness conditional on peer quality. In contrast, under market-stability assumptions that allow parents to omit desirable but seemingly unattainable schools, we find that parents value both effectiveness and peer quality. The difference arises because the most selective schools are also the most effective, causing approaches that interpret omissions as evidence of low demand to understate demand for school effectiveness.