Econometrica

Journal Of The Econometric Society

An International Society for the Advancement of Economic
Theory in its Relation to Statistics and Mathematics

Edited by: Guido W. Imbens • Print ISSN: 0012-9682 • Online ISSN: 1468-0262

Econometrica: Jan, 2014, Volume 82, Issue 1

The Elite Illusion: Achievement Effects at Boston and New York Exam Schools

https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA10266
p. 137-196

Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Joshua Angrist, Parag Pathak

Parents gauge school quality in part by the level of student achievement and a school's racial and socioeconomic mix. The importance of school characteristics in the housing market can be seen in the jump in house prices at school district boundaries where peer characteristics change. The question of whether schools with more attractive peers are really better in a value‐added sense remains open, however. This paper uses a fuzzy regression‐discontinuity design to evaluate the causal effects of peer characteristics. Our design exploits admissions cutoffs at Boston and New York City's heavily over‐subscribed exam schools. Successful applicants near admissions cutoffs for the least selective of these schools move from schools with scores near the bottom of the state SAT score distribution to schools with scores near the median. Successful applicants near admissions cutoffs for the most selective of these schools move from above‐average schools to schools with students whose scores fall in the extreme upper tail. Exam school students can also expect to study with fewer nonwhite classmates than unsuccessful applicants. Our estimates suggest that the marked changes in peer characteristics at exam school admissions cutoffs have little causal effect on test scores or college quality.


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Supplement to "The Elite Illusion: Achievement Effects at Boston and New York Exam Schools"

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Supplement to "The Elite Illusion: Achievement Effects at Boston and New York Exam Schools"

This document describes the processing steps from the original data files to the analysis used in manuscript.