Christopher Campos

Social Interactions, Information, and Preferences for Schools: Experimental Evidence from Los Angeles
Date Posted:Tue, 01 Oct 2024 09:34:04 -0500
This paper measures parents' beliefs about school and peer quality, how information about each affects school choices, and how social interactions mediate these effects. Parents underestimate school quality and overestimate peer quality. Cross-randomized school and peer quality information combined with a spillover design shows that when parents received information, they and their neighbors' preferences shifted toward higher value-added schools, underscoring stronger tastes for school quality and the role of social interactions. Increased enrollment in effective schools improved socio-emotional outcomes. The experimental evidence shows parents value school effectiveness even conditional on peer quality and that social interactions strongly influence school choice.

Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Social Interactions, Information, and Preferences for Schools: Experimental Evidence from Los Angeles
Date Posted:Sun, 29 Sep 2024 22:37:38 -0500

The Impact of Public School Choice: Evidence from Los Angeles' Zones of Choice
Date Posted:Mon, 14 Aug 2023 11:40:35 -0500
Does a school district that expands school choice provide better outcomes for students than a neighborhood-based assignment system? This paper studies the Zones of Choice (ZOC) program, a school choice initiative of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) that created small high school markets in some neighborhoods but left attendance-zone boundaries in place throughout the rest of the district. We study market-level impacts of choice on student achievement and college enrollment using a differences-in-differences design. Student outcomes in ZOC markets increased markedly, narrowing achievement and college enrollment gaps between ZOC neighborhoods and the rest of the district. The effects of ZOC are larger for schools exposed to more competition, supporting the notion that competition is a key channel. Demand estimates suggest families place substantial weight on schools' academic quality, providing schools with competition-induced incentives to improve their effectiveness. The evidence demonstrates that public school choice programs have the potential to improve school quality and reduce neighborhood-based disparities in educational opportunity.

Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Who Benefits from Remote Schooling? Self-Selection and Match Effects
Date Posted:Mon, 07 Aug 2023 11:08:21 -0500
We study the distributional effects of remote learning using a novel approach that combines preference data from a conjoint survey experiment with administrative records of student outcomes. The experimentally derived preference data allow us to account for selection into remote learning while also studying selection patterns and treatment effect heterogeneity. We validate the approach using random variation from school choice lotteries. Our analysis of the average impacts of remote learning finds negative effects on reading (?0.13?) and math (?0.14?) achievement. Notably, we find evidence of positive learning effects for children whose parents have the strongest demand for remote learning. Parental concerns related to bullying appear to be an important driver of the demand for remote learning. Moreover, we find that across-the-board positive impacts of remote learning on bullying outcomes operate as a compensating differential for negative impacts on learning. Our results suggest that an important subset of students who currently sort into post-pandemic remote learning benefit from expanded choice.

Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Who Benefits from Remote Schooling? Self-Selection and Match Effects
Date Posted:Thu, 20 Jul 2023 17:38:43 -0500
We study the distributional effects of remote learning. Our approach combines newly collected data on parental preferences with administrative data from Los Angeles. The preference data allow us to account for selection into remote learning while also studying selection patterns and treatment effect heterogeneity. We find a negative average effect of remote learning on reading (?0.14?) and math (?0.17?). Notably, we find evidence of positive learning effects for children whose parents have the strongest demand for remote learning. Our results suggest an important subset of students who currently sort into post-pandemic remote learning benefit from expanded choice.

The Impact of Public School Choice: Evidence from Los Angeles? Zones of Choice
Date Posted:Thu, 20 Jul 2023 17:34:39 -0500
Does a school district that expands school choice provide better outcomes for students than a neighborhood-based assignment system? This paper studies the Zones of Choice program, a school choice initiative that created small high school markets in some neighborhoods but left attendance-zone boundaries in place throughout the rest of the district. We study market-level impacts of choice on student achievement and college enrollment using a differences-in-differences design. Student outcomes in ZOC markets increased markedly, narrowing achievement and college enrollment gaps between ZOC neighborhoods and the rest of the district. The effects of ZOC are larger for schools exposed to more competition, supporting the notion that competition is a key channel. Demand estimates suggest families place substantial weight on schools? academic quality, providing schools with competition-induced incentives to improve their effectiveness. The evidence demonstrates that public school choice programs have the potential to improve school quality and reduce neighborhood-based disparities in educational opportunity.

Independent Contracting, Self-Employment, and Gig Work: Evidence from California Tax Data
Date Posted:Mon, 08 Aug 2022 06:31:10 -0500
We use de-identified data from California personal income tax returns to measure the frequency and nature of independent contracting and self-employment work in California. We identify this work by the presence of a Schedule C on the tax return and/or the receipt of a Form 1099 information return. We estimate that 14.4% of California workers aged 18-64 in tax year 2016 had some independent contracting or self-employment income; about half of these workers also had earnings from traditional W-2 jobs during the year. We find that only a small share (1.4%) of workers had earnings from online labor platforms (often called gig work). Workers with low earnings were significantly more likely to earn independent contracting or self-employment income and to rely primarily or exclusively on that income. We explore the characteristics of workers engaging in independent contracting and self-employment and their distribution across family type, geography, and industry.

Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

REVISION: The Impact of Neighborhood School Choice: Evidence from Los Angeles' Zones of Choice
Date Posted:Tue, 29 Mar 2022 18:01:02 -0500
This paper evaluates the Zones of Choice (ZOC) program in Los Angeles, a school choice initiative that created small high school markets in some neighborhoods but left traditional attendance-zone boundaries in place throughout the rest of the district. We study the impacts of ZOC on student achievement and college enrollment using a matched difference-in-differences design that compares changes in outcomes for ZOC schools and demographically similar non-ZOC schools. Our findings reveal that ZOC has boosted student outcomes markedly, closing achievement and college-enrollment gaps between ZOC neighborhoods and the rest of the district. These gains are largely explained by general improvements in school effectiveness rather than changes in student match quality, and the school-effectiveness gains are concentrated among the lowest-performing schools. We interpret these findings through the lens of a model of school demand in which schools exert costly effort to improve quality. The ...

REVISION: The Impact of Neighborhood School Choice: Evidence from Los Angeles' Zones of Choice
Date Posted:Thu, 13 Jan 2022 11:53:10 -0600
This paper evaluates the Zones of Choice (ZOC) program in Los Angeles, a school choice initiative that created small high school markets in some neighborhoods but left traditional attendance-zone boundaries in place throughout the rest of the district. We study the impacts of ZOC on student achievement and college enrollment using a matched difference-in-differences design that compares changes in outcomes for ZOC schools and demographically similar non-ZOC schools. Our findings reveal that ZOC has boosted student outcomes markedly, closing achievement and college-enrollment gaps between ZOC neighborhoods and the rest of the district. These gains are largely explained by general improvements in school effectiveness rather than changes in student match quality, and the school-effectiveness gains are concentrated among the lowest-performing schools. We interpret these findings through the lens of a model of school demand in which schools exert costly effort to improve quality. The ...

REVISION: The Impacts of Neighborhood School Choice: Evidence from Los Angeles' Zones of Choice
Date Posted:Tue, 08 Jun 2021 07:18:38 -0500
This paper evaluates the Zones of Choice (ZOC) program in Los Angeles, a school choice initiative that created small high school markets in some neighborhoods but left traditional attendance zone boundaries in place throughout the rest of the district. We study the impacts of the ZOC program on student achievement and college enrollment using a matched difference-in-differences design that compares changes in outcomes for ZOC schools and demographically similar non-ZOC schools. Our findings reveal that the ZOC program boosted student outcomes markedly, closing achievement and college enrollment gaps between ZOC neighborhoods and the rest of the district. These gains are explained by general improvements in school effectiveness rather than changes in student match quality, and school-specific gains are concentrated among the lowest-performing schools. We interpret these findings through the lens of a model of school demand in which schools exert costly effort to improve quality. The ...

The Impact of Public School Choice: Evidence from Los Angeles' Zones of Choice
Date Posted:Thu, 22 Apr 2021 15:59:00 -0500
Does a school district that expands school choice provide better outcomes for students than a neighborhood-based assignment system? This paper studies the Zones of Choice program, a school choice initiative that created small high school markets in some neighborhoods but left attendance-zone boundaries in place throughout the rest of the district. We study market-level impacts of choice on student achievement and college enrollment using a differences-in-differences design. Student outcomes in ZOC markets increased markedly, narrowing achievement and college enrollment gaps between ZOC neighborhoods and the rest of the district. The effects of ZOC are larger for schools exposed to more competition, supporting the notion that competition is a key channel. Demand estimates suggest families place substantial weight on schools' academic quality, providing schools with competition-induced incentives to improve their effectiveness. The evidence demonstrates that public school choice programs have the potential to improve school quality and reduce neighborhood-based disparities in educational opportunity.