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  3. American Economic Review
  4. May 2017
  5. Regression Discontinuity in Serial Dictatorship: Achievement Effects at Chicago's Exam Schools

Regression Discontinuity in Serial Dictatorship: Achievement Effects at Chicago's Exam Schools

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Abstract

Many school and college admission systems use centralized mechanisms to allocate seats based on applicant preferences and school priorities. When tie-breaking uses non-randomly assigned criteria like distance or a test score, applicants with the same preferences and priorities are not directly comparable. The non-lottery setting does generate a kind of local random assignment that opens the door to regression discontinuity designs. This paper introduces a hybrid RD/propensity score empirical strategy that exploits quasi-experiments embedded in serial dictatorship, a mechanism widely used for college and selective K-12 school admissions. We use our approach to estimate achievement effects of Chicago's exam schools.

Citation

Abdulkadiroǧlu, Atila, Joshua D. Angrist, Yusuke Narita, Parag A. Pathak, and Roman A. Zarate. 2017. "Regression Discontinuity in Serial Dictatorship: Achievement Effects at Chicago's Exam Schools." American Economic Review, 107 (5): 240-45. DOI: 10.1257/aer.p20171111

Additional Materials

JEL Classification

  • C78 Bargaining Theory; Matching Theory
  • D44 Auctions
  • D82 Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
  • I21 Analysis of Education