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.

Abstract We examine the effect of more than 3,400 gun shows using data from Gun and Knife Show Calendar and vital statistics data from California and Texas. Considering the one month following each show and a surrounding area ranging from 80 to 2,000 square miles, we find no evidence that gun shows increase either gun homicides or suicides. The similarity of our estimates for California and Texas suggests that the much tighter California gun show regulations do not substantially reduce the number of firearms-related deaths in that state. Using incident-level crime data for Houston, Texas, we also find no evidence of an effect on other crime categories.