CV Research Teaching Main page

Selected working papers and publications: Anti-lemons: School reputation and educational quality , with W. Bentley MacLeod. Going to a better school: Effects and behavioral responses, with Cristian Pop-Eleches. The effects of user fee reductions on enrollment: Evidence from a quasi-experiment, with Felipe Barrera and Leigh Linden. Parental choice and school markets: The impact of information on school effectiveness, with Alejandra Mizala. Class size caps, sorting, and the regression discontinuity design, with Eric Verhoogen. American Economic Review, 99(1), 179-215, 2009. The older NBER working paper version under the title “Class size and sorting in market equilibrium: Theory and evidence” is available here. School choice, stratification, and information on school performance, with Patrick McEwan and Emiliana Vegas. Economía (Journal of the Latin American Economic Association), Spring, 1-27, 2008. Socioeconomic status or noise? Tradeoffs in the generation of school quality information, with Alejandra Mizala and Pilar Romaguera. Journal of Development Economics, 84, 61-75, 2007. Apples and oranges: Educational enrollment and attainment across countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, with Valentina Calderon. International Journal of Educational Development, 26, 572-590, 2006. The effects of generalized school choice on achievement and stratification: Evidence from Chile's school voucher program, with Chang-Tai Hsieh. Journal of Public Economics, 90, 1477-1503, 2006. A previous and longer version under the title “When schools compete, how do they Compete? An assessment of Chile’s nationwide voucher program” is available here. Identifying class size effects in developing countries: Evidence from rural Bolivia, Review of Economics and Statistics, 88(1), 171-177, 2006. Does school choice lead to sorting? Evidence from Tiebout variation, American Economic Review, 95(4), 1310-1326, 2005. A previous version with some additional material, under the title “Demand matters: School district concentration, composition, and educational expenditure” is available here. The central role of noise in evaluating interventions that use test scores to rank schools, with Ken Chay and Patrick McEwan, American Economic Review, September, 95(4), 1237-1258, 2005. The older NBER working paper version is available here. Arbitrary variation in teacher salaries, with Emiliana Vegas, in Incentives to improve teaching: Lessons from Latin America. Washington, D.C.: The World Bank. Capitalization and privatization in Bolivia: An approximation to an evaluation, with Gover Barja and David McKenzie, in Reality check: The distributional impact of privatization in developing countries. Washington, D.C.: Center for Global Development, 2005. What difference does it make if school and work are connected? Evidence on Cooperative Education in the U.S., with David Stern, Neil Finkelstein, and Helen Cagampang, Economics of Education Review, 16(3), 1997.