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American Economic Review Vol. 107 No. 5 2017

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

Atila Abdulkadiroğlu1; Joshua D. Angrist2; Yusuke Narita3; Parag A. Pathak2; Roman A. Zarate4

1 Duke, 219B Social Sciences Building, Durham, NC 27708, and NBER (e-mail: ) · 2 MIT, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA 02142, and NBER (e-mail: ) · 3 Yale, 37 Hillhouse, Room 38, New Haven, CT 06511 (e-mail: ) · 4 MIT, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA 02142 (e-mail: )

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.

DOI
10.1257/aer.p20171111
Volume
107
Issue
5
Pages
240-245
Language
en
Sources
openalex crossref

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