In brief... House Prices and School Quality: Evidence from State and Private Education in Paris

It is now widely understood that the quality of state schools in a neighbourhood has an impact on local house prices. Analysing data for Paris, Gabrielle Fack and Julien Grenet have looked deeper into this link by exploring how the presence of private schools influences parents' willingness to pay to live near good state schools.School catchment areas, France, private education, public education, housing, house prices

When do Better Schools Raise Housing Prices? Evidence from Paris Public and Private Schools

In this paper, we investigate how housing prices react to the quality of education offered by neighbouring public and private schools. The organization of secondary schooling in the city of Paris, which combines residence-based-assignment to public schools with a well-developed and almost entirely publicly funded private school system, offers a valuable empirical context for analyzing how private schools affect the capitalization of public school performance in housing prices. Using comprehensive data on both schools and real estate transact ions over the period 1997-2004, we develop a matching framework to carefully compare sales across school attendance boundaries. We find that a standard deviation increase in public school performance raises housing prices by 1.4 to 2.4%. Moreover, we show that the capitalization of public school performance in the price of real estate shrinks as the availability of private schools increases in the neighbourhood. Our results confirm the predictions of general equilibrium models of school choice that private schools, by providing an advantageous outside option to parents, tend to mitigate the impact of public school performance on housing prices.School attendance zones, private schools, housing markets,residential segregation

Electrical glassy behavior in granular aluminium thin films

We present new results obtained by field effect measurements on insulating granular Al thin films. First, reproducible and stable conductance fluctuations are seen in micron size samples as a function of gate voltage. The anomalous field effect and its slow relaxation already known to exist in macroscopic samples are shown to still exist in small samples and to have no influence on the fluctuations pattern. Secondly, "true" aging is demonstrated, i.e. the anomalous field effect relaxation depends on the time elapsed since the cooling, the longer this time the longer it takes for the system to react to a gate voltage change. Interpretations and implications of these findings are discussed.Comment: 5th International Conference on Electronic Crystals (ECRYS), Carg\`ese : France (2008

Screening and conductance relaxations in insulating granular aluminium thin films

We have recently found in insulating granular Al thin film a new experimental feature (Delahaye et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 186602, 2011), namely the existence of a conductance relaxation that is not sensitive to gate voltage changes. This conductance relaxation is related to the existence of a metallic-like screening in the film and can be used to estimate its characteristic length scale. In the present paper, we give some experimental details on how this feature was measured and present our first results on the screening length temperature dependence.Comment: 14th Transport in interacting disordered systems (TIDS14) conference, September 5-8 2011, Acre (Israel

Improving College Access and Success for Low-Income Students: Evidence from a Large Need-Based Grant Program

International audienceUsing comprehensive administrative data on France's single largest financial aid program, this paper provides new evidence on the impact of large-scale need-based grant programs on the college enrollment decisions, persistence, and graduation rates of low-income students. We exploit sharp discontinuities in the grant eligibility formula to identify the impact of aid on student outcomes at different levels of study. We find that the provision of 1,500 euros cash allowances to prospective undergraduate or graduate students increases their college enrollment rates by 5 to 7 percent. Moreover, we show that need-based grants have positive effects on student persistence and degree completion

Do French Managers Know their Companies? Lessons from the REPONSE Survey

This article explores the potential pitfalls of using surveys on organisational practices, firms technological choices, and workplace relations. Using a generic methodology, one can estimate the degree of truthfulness or consistency of responding executives working in different local units of a single enterprise. Applied to the French REPONSE survey in regard to the enterprises general characteristics, the methodology suggests that (1) executives usually give rather consistent answers to a question handled separately from the others, and (2) that their answers are all the more specific as the questions are simple and fall within the respondents sphere of competency. However, responses to questions on social relations and trade-union representation in the firm are less reliable. Allowing for executives errors, we are led to substantially revise both the level and the rate of change of a number of variables, particularly the weights of different employees unions in firms.Organizational Change, Workplace Relations, Survey Methods

Beyond Truth-Telling: Preference Estimation with Centralized School Choice and College Admissions

We propose novel approaches and tests for estimating student preferences with data from centralized matching mechanisms, like the Gale-Shapley Deferred Acceptance, when students are strictly ranked by, e.g., test scores. Without requiring truth-telling to be the unique equilibrium, we show that the matching is (asymptotically) stable, or justified-envy-free, implying that every student is matched with her favorite school/college among those she is qualified for ex post. Having illustrated the approaches in simulations, we apply them to school choice data from Paris and demonstrate evidence supporting stability but not truth-telling. We discuss when each approach is more appropriate in real-life settings

Observation of thermally activated glassiness and memory dip in a-NbSi insulating thin films

We present electrical conductance measurements on amorphous NbSi insulating thin films. These films display out-of equilibrium electronic features that are markedly different from what has been reported so far in disordered insulators. Like in the most studied systems (indium oxide and granular Al films), a slow relaxation of the conductance is observed after a quench to liquid helium temperature which gives rise to the growth of a memory dip in MOSFET devices. But unlike in these systems, this memory dip and the related conductance relaxations are still visible up to room temperature, with clear signatures of a temperature dependent dynamics

Decentralizing Centralized Matching Markets: Implications from Early Offers in University Admissions

The matching literature often recommends market centralization under the assumption that agents know their own preferences and that their preferences are fixed. We find counterevidence to this assumption in a quasi-experiment. In Germany's university admissions, a clearinghouse implements the early stages of the Gale-Shapley algorithm in real time. We show that early offers made in this decentralized phase, although not more desirable, are accepted more often than later ones. These results, together with survey evidence and a theoretical model, are consistent with students' costly learning about universities. We propose a hybrid mechanism to combine the advantages of decentralization and centralization

Beyond Truth-Telling: Preference Estimation with Centralized School Choice and College Admissions

We propose novel approaches and tests for estimating student preferences with data from centralized matching mechanisms, like the Gale-Shapley Deferred Acceptance, when students are strictly ranked by, e.g., test scores. Without requiring truth-telling to be the unique equilibrium, we show that the matching is (asymptotically) stable, or justified-envy-free, implying that every student is matched with her favorite school/college among those she is qualified for ex post. Having illustrated the approaches in simulations, we apply them to school choice data from Paris and demonstrate evidence supporting stability but not truth-telling. We discuss when each approach is more appropriate in real-life settings