Working Papers
Constrained School Choice and the Demand for Effective Schools, with Diether Beuermann, 2025
Job Market Paper
Choosing a school is one of the most important decisions parents make regarding their children’s human capital, yet they often face restricted choice sets. We study parental preferences over peer quality and school effectiveness in the centralized education market of Barbados, where admissions are based on a one-shot exam and parents face a binding cap on the number of schools to which they can apply. Exploiting a policy reform that further tightened this cap, we show that parents responded by omitting the most selective schools from their applications, underscoring how market design shapes application behavior. We then estimate parental preferences for school effectiveness—measured by impacts on test scores and adult wages—as well as peer quality. Preference estimates under the assumption of truth-telling indicate that parents do not value effectiveness after controlling for peer quality. In contrast, preference estimates under the assumption of market stability, which allows for strategic behavior, show that parents place substantial weight on both effectiveness and peer quality. This divergence arises because the most selective schools are also the most effective, forcing parents to trade off effectiveness against admission probabilities.
School Choice, Skill Measures, and Graduation, with Maria Elena Ortega-Hesles, 2025
Conditionally 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.
Perceived Ability and School Choices: Experimental Evidence and Scale-up Effects, with Matteo Bobba and Veronica Frisancho, 2025
R&R (second round) 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.
Time Varying Effects of Elite Schools: Evidence from Mexico City, with Salvador Navarro, 2025
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.
Work in Progress
Intergenerational Mobility in Skills, Education, and Wages, with Diether Beuermann, Maia Guell, and Jose V. Rodriguez Mora
Measuring intergenerational mobility in lifecycle economic well-being is complicated by the lack of data linking generations covering long periods of time and a variety of outcomes. In this paper, we address this challenge by following the method of Guell, Rodriguez Mora, and Telmer (2015) for measuring intergenerational mobility in educational attainment, which utilizes the informational content of surnames to circumvent the need for intergenerational panel data. We extend their work by considering mobility in standardized skill measures and life cycle earnings. For this, we utilize information on 18 cohorts of participants in the centralized secondary admissions system in Trinidad and Tobago, linked to labor market data. We aim to understand the roles of education and labor market sorting in affecting mobility.
Intergenerational Mobility at an Early Stage: An Analysis of Performance in School Subjects, with Maia Guell and Jose V. Rodriguez Mora
This paper examines intergenerational mobility in skill measures across various stages of educational trajectories. We follow the method of Guell, Rodriguez Mora, and Telmer (2015) for measuring intergenerational mobility in educational attainment but complement their work by focusing on the skills developed during the process of attaining education. To do this, we use eight years of standardized exam data in mathematics and Spanish, covering the entire population of Mexico. Our goal is to construct measures of intergenerational mobility in different skills at various points along educational trajectories, with two main objectives. First, to better understand the role of different skills as determinants of intergenerational persistence in well-being. Second, to improve our understanding of the role of schools in leveling the playing field.