The Demand for Effective Charter Schools

By Christopher R. Walters. Journal of Political Economy, 2018

135 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper models decisions to apply to and attend charter schools in Boston using a generalized Roy selection framework linking preferences to the achievement gains generated by charter attendance. The model is estimated with instruments based on randomized admission lotteries and distance to charter schools. Charter schools generate larger gains for disadvantaged students, but demand for charters is stronger among more advantaged students. Similarly, gains are inversely related to unobserved preferences for charters. As a result, counterfactual simulations indicate that charter expansion is likely to be most effective when accompanied by efforts to target students who are unlikely to apply.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Education, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aab116921d9bcdad866c2758ac70901a444f7cd0

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Citations in the corpus

Charters Without Lotteries: Testing Takeovers in New Orleans and Boston (2016, unknown): “Our findings echo those of Walters (2014) in highlighting the importance of charter access.”
The Welfare Effects of Coordinated Assignment: Evidence from the New York City High School Match (2017, background): “To scale the magnitude of welfare effects, we first measure aggregate welfare from two extremes: a neighborhood assignment allocation, where each student 3The fact that strategy-proof mechanisms generate reliable demand data is a common argument in their favor (see, e.g., Abdulkadiroğlu, Pathak,…”
Do Parents Value School Effectiveness? (2020, methodology): “This model relies on an exclusion restriction for distance, a common identification strategy in the literature on educational choice (Card, 1995; Neal, 1997; Booker et al., 2011; Mountjoy, 2017; Walters, 2018).”