Econometrica

Journal Of The Econometric Society

An International Society for the Advancement of Economic
Theory in its Relation to Statistics and Mathematics

Edited by: Guido W. Imbens • Print ISSN: 0012-9682 • Online ISSN: 1468-0262

Econometrica: Sep, 2006, Volume 74, Issue 5

The Effect of School Choice on Participants: Evidence from Randomized Lotteries

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0262.2006.00702.x
p. 1191-1230

Julie Berry Cullen, Brian A Jacob, Steven Levitt

School choice has become an increasingly prominent strategy for enhancing academic achievement. To evaluate the impact on participants, we exploit randomized lotteries that determine high school admission in the Chicago Public Schools. Compared to those students who lose lotteries, students who win attend high schools that are better in a number of dimensions, including peer achievement and attainment levels. Nonetheless, we find little evidence that winning a lottery provides any systematic benefit across a wide variety of traditional academic measures. Lottery winners do, however, experience improvements on a subset of nontraditional outcome measures, such as self‐reported disciplinary incidents and arrest rates.


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Supplemental Material

Appendix B: Calculating Value-Added by High School Campus

This appendix describes how we calculated a value-added measure for each school in order to examine the impact of winning a lottery by school productivity.

Appendix C: Testing for Attrition Bias

This appendix presents a variety of additional tests that we conducted to examine the sensitivity of our estimates to potential selective attrition.  We first show the relationship between missing outcomes and observable characteristics for a variety of different outcome measures.  We next examines the sensitivity of the ninth grade reading score results to a variety of sample selection correction methodologies, including generic bounding, worst-case bounding and optimistic bounding.

Supplemental material for "The Effect of School Choice on Participants: Evidence from Randomized Lotteries": Data (part 1)

This zip file, together with data (part 2), are intended to help the interested reader replicate our results. They contain do files, data sets and a word document with data descriptions.

Supplemental material for "The Effect of School Choice on Participants: Evidence from Randomized Lotteries": Data (part 2)

Please use version 10 of Winzip to open this file.

Appendix B: Calculating Value-Added by High School Campus

This appendix describes how we calculated a value-added measure for each school in order to examine the impact of winning a lottery by school productivity.

Appendix C: Testing for Attrition Bias

This appendix presents a variety of additional tests that we conducted to examine the sensitivity of our estimates to potential selective attrition.  We first show the relationship between missing outcomes and observable characteristics for a variety of different outcome measures.  We next examines the sensitivity of the ninth grade reading score results to a variety of sample selection correction methodologies, including generic bounding, worst-case bounding and optimistic bounding.

Supplemental material for "The Effect of School Choice on Participants: Evidence from Randomized Lotteries": Data (part 1)

This zip file, together with data (part 2), are intended to help the interested reader replicate our results. They contain do files, data sets and a word document with data descriptions.

Supplemental material for "The Effect of School Choice on Participants: Evidence from Randomized Lotteries": Data (part 2)

Please use version 10 of Winzip to open this file.