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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: )

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 (5)

Pages

240-245

Language

en

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