Breaking Ties: Regression Discontinuity Design Meets Market Design

Centralized school assignment algorithms must distinguish between applicants with the same preferences and priorities. This is done with randomly assigned lottery numbers, nonlottery tie-breakers like test scores, or both. The New York City public high school match illustrates the latter, using test scores, grades, and interviews to rank applicants to screened schools, combined with lottery tie-breaking at unscreened schools. We show how to identify causal effects of school attendance in such settings. Our approach generalizes regression discontinuity designs to allow for multiple treatments and multiple running variables, some of which are randomly assigned. Lotteries generate assignment risk at screened as well as unscreened schools. Centralized assignment also identifies screened school effects away from screened school cutoffs. These features of centralized assignment are used to assess the predictive value of New York City’s school report cards. Grade A schools improve SAT math scores and increase the likelihood of graduating, though by less than OLS estimates suggest. Selection bias in OLS estimates is egregious for Grade A screened schools

Incentives and Implementation in Marriage Markets with Externalities

We study the implementability of stable correspondences in marriage markets with externalities. We prove that, contrary to what happens in markets without externalities, no stable revelation mechanism makes a dominant strategy for the agents on one side of the market to reveal their preferences. However, the stable correspondence is implementable in Nash equilibrium

No Excuses Charter Schools: A Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence on Student Achievement

While charter schools differ widely in philosophy and pedagogical views, the United States’s most famous urban charter schools typically use the No Excuses approach. Enrolling mainly poor and minority students, these schools feature high academic standards, strict disciplinary codes, extended instructional time, and targeted supports for low-performing students. The strenuous and regimented style is controversial amongst some scholars, but others contend that the No Excuses approach is needed to rapidly close the achievement gap. We conduct the first meta-analysis of the achievement impacts of No Excuses charter schools. Focusing on experimental studies, we find that No Excuses charter schools significantly improve math scores and reading scores. We estimate gains of 0.25 and 0.16 standard deviations on math and literacy achievement, respectively, as the effect of attending a No Excuses charter school for one year. Though the effect is large and meaningful, we offer some caveats to this finding and discuss policy implications for the United States as well as other countries

Will Democracy Endure Private School Choice? The Effect of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program on Adult Voting Behavior

We employ probit regression analysis to compare the adult voting activity of students who participated in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) to their matched public school counterparts. We use a sophisticated matching algorithm to create a traditional public school student comparison group using data from the state-mandated evaluation of the MPCP. By the time the students are 19-26 years old, we do not find evidence that private school voucher students are more or less likely to vote in 2012 or 2016 than students educated in public schools. These results are robust to all models and are consistent for all subgroups

The Effects of Doubling Instruction Efforts on Middle School Students' Achievement: Evidence from a Multiyear Regression-Discontinuity Design

We use a regression-discontinuity design to study the effects of double blocking sixth-grade students in reading and mathematics on their achievement across three years of middle school. To identify the effect of the intervention, we use sharp cutoffs in the test scores used to assign students to double blocking. We find large, positive, and persistent effects of double blocking in reading, but, unlike previous research, we find no statistically significant effects of double blocking in mathematics either in the short run or medium run

The economics of debt clearing mechanisms

We examine the evolution of decentralized clearinghouse mechanisms from the 13th to the 18th century; in particular, we explore the clearing of non- or limitedtradable debts like bills of exchange. We construct a theoretical model of these clearinghouse mechanisms, similar to the models in the theoretical matching literature, and show that specific decentralized multilateral clearing algorithms known as rescontre, skontrieren or virement des parties used by merchants were efficient in specific historical contexts. We can explain both the evolutionary self-organizing emergence of late medieval and early modern fairs, and its robustness during the 17th and 18th century