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The Effects of Charter High Schools on Educational Attainment

Kevin Booker; Tim R. Sass; Brian Gill; Ron Zimmer
Journal of Labor Economics 2011 29(2), 377-415
We analyze the relationship between charter high school attendance and educational attainment in Florida and in Chicago. Controlling for observed student characteristics and test scores, we estimate that among students who attended a charter middle school, those who went on to attend a charter high school were 7–15 percentage points more likely to earn a standard diploma than students who transitioned to a traditional public high school. Similarly, those attending a charter high school were 8–10 percentage points more likely to attend college. We find even larger effects when we treat high school choice as endogenous.

Evaluating Education Programs That Have Lotteried Admission and Selective Attrition

John Engberg; Dennis Epple; Jason Imbrogno; Holger Sieg; Ron Zimmer
Journal of Labor Economics 2014 32(1), 27-63 open access
We study the effectiveness of magnet programs in an urban district that ration excess demand by admission lotteries. Differential attrition arises since students who lose the lottery are more likely to pursue options outside the school district than students who win the lottery. When students leave the district, important outcome variables are often not observed. The treatment effects are not point-identified. We exploit known quantiles of the outcome distribution to construct informative bounds on treatment effects. We find that magnet programs improve behavioral outcomes but have no significant effect on achievement.