research

Working Papers

1. The Impact of Neighborhood School Choice: Evidence from Los Angeles’ Zones of Choice

   Campos, Christopher, and Kearns, Caitlin

   Reject and Resubmit at QJE

   Abs PDF

   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 model allows us to measure the increase in competition facing each ZOC school based on household preferences and the spatial distribution of schools. We demonstrate that the effects of ZOC were larger for schools exposed to more competition, supporting the notion that competition is a key channel driving the impacts of ZOC. Demand estimates derived from rank-ordered preference lists suggest families place substantial weight on schools’ academic quality, providing schools competitive incentives to improve their effectiveness. Our findings demonstrate the potential for public school choice to alter the quality of an important determinant of neighborhood quality, reduce neighborhood-based disparities in educational opportunity, and produce sustained improvements in student outcomes.

2. The "Gig" Economy and Independent Contracting: Evidence from California Tax Data

   Bernhardt, Annette, Campos, Christopher, Prohofsky, Allen, Ramesh, Aparna, and Rothstein, Jesse

   Revise and Resubmit at ILRR

   Abs PDF

   We use de-identified data from California personal income tax returns to measure the frequency and nature of independent contracting work in California. We identify independent contractors 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 income; over half of these do not have traditional jobs generating W-2s and get all of their earnings from independent contracting. Workers with low earnings are significantly more likely to earn independent contracting income and to rely primarily or exclusively on that income. We explore the characteristics of independent contractors and their distribution across family type, geography, and industry.

Work in Progress

1. Social Interactions and Preferences for Schools: Experimental Evidence from Los Angeles

   Campos, Christopher

   Draft coming soon

   Abs

   Unlike conventional markets, the notion of quality in education markets is vastly more ambiguous and challenging to observe. In addition, there is a considerable amount of debate surrounding the margins of quality that govern how parents select schools, and in a setting with imperfect information, parents may resort to other parents’ private signals to make decisions. Therefore, inadequate information, preferences, and social interactions may each play different roles in distorting school incentives. I design an information provision experiment that allows me to study these various factors among parents making schooling decisions in Los Angeles. To study relative preferences for school and peer quality, I cross-randomize two margins of information, and to study social interactions, I use a spillover design that allows me to detect treatment effects for untreated parents in treated schools. I find that receiving information on either quality margin changes parents’ decisions, suggesting parents are imperfectly informed about both. I then show that social interactions are prevalent, generating treatment effects for untreated parents in treated schools similar to treated parents. The social interactions are sufficiently large to generate market-level consensuses uniformly moving demand toward higher value-added schools coupled with a systematic shift toward schools with lower quality peers. These findings suggest that when parents are perfectly informed about both school and peer quality, parental interactions are essential for interpreting the information and that demand moves in a way consistent with parents rewarding effective schools, providing schools incentives that are more aligned with improving student learning. The experiment ran again in Fall 2021 and results for the second iteration are forthcoming.

2. Decomposing the Gender Earnings Gap

   Bucarey, Alonso, Campos, Christopher, Contreras, Dante, and Munoz, Pablo

   Draft coming soon

   Abs

   This paper studies the interplay between preferences, gender return differentials, and centralized assignment in explaining the gender earnings gap among college graduates. Using rich data of rank-ordered lists from the Chilean centralized college admissions system coupled with a Roy-style framework, we decompose the within-major gender earnings gap into differences in the returns to different majors and differences in self-selection into majors. We find that most of the within-major earnings gap is due to differences in labor market returns for men and women majoring in the same fields, but we also find differences in self-selection patterns between men and women. Oaxaca-style decompositions show that most of the gap is due to differences in the representation of women in high-earning majors, with Engineering playing a significant role. We conclude with a counterfactual analysis that leverages the rules embedded in centralized assignment to assess the scope of differences policies. Our findings show that gender-specific quotas may serve as a feasible policy lever that increases the representation of women in high earnings field and substantially reduces the gender earnings gap among college graduates.