Abstract: This paper examines early-career labor market effects of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), a nationwide curriculum standards reform aimed at raising K-12 instructional standards. Leveraging variation in the timing of CCSS adoption across states and differential exposure across birth cohorts, I apply a difference-in-differences framework to American Community Survey data to show that greater CCSS exposure increases wage income among young adults. These gains are driven by increases in labor supply along the intensive margin and higher hourly wages, rather than by changes in educational attainment or labor force participation. Evidence from shifts in occupations, industries, and college degree fields suggests that the CCSS improved job sorting---away from low-wage, low-skill sectors and into roles requiring less physical abilities and more interpersonal skills. The findings highlight the potential of nationwide, standards-based reforms to enhance baseline labor market readiness and promote more equitable early-career outcomes.

Abstract: Exam schools are highly selective and popular among families, yet the reasons for their popularity are unclear. I study the relationships among applicant preferences, peer quality, and school effectiveness for academic outcomes in New York City (NYC) public high schools, jointly estimating preferences for exam and non-exam schools with a composite-likelihood discrete-choice model in which peer quality, estimated effectiveness (value-added), and student--school match enter the utility directly. Among families who apply to a specialized high school, a one-standard-deviation increase in peer quality is valued more than an equivalent increase in value-added across the non-specialized sector---nearly all schools and alternatives in a student's choice set: the ordering holds in every specification and robustness check, decisively so in the preferred specification and seven of eight checks---an additional 4.4 miles of proximity, against 1.9 for value-added, roughly twice as much in magnitude---and is statistically indistinguishable from parity only when schools too small to estimate value-added directly are retained with imputed measures. Within the 8 specialized (exam) high schools specifically, families also place a substantial premium on the sector itself: at the sector's own mean quality this total premium is precisely estimated at 13.6 miles of proximity (95% CI [12.5, 14.7]), though how it divides between a pure preference for the sector and the SHS-specific quality interactions estimated alongside it is not pinned down, since a small-sample sign-permutation procedure appropriate to the estimate's 8-school identification does not reject that the sector-intercept component is zero. This sector premium, and the significant SHS-specific peer-quality and match interactions alongside it, are broadly confirmed rather than contradicted by the subsample of students (a selected 13% of the sample) whose cross-sector preference is directly revealed rather than assumed. Read together, peer quality is the channel families respond to broadly across the school system, while what makes specialized high schools distinctly attractive is less precisely pinned down by the data.

Abstract: Inferring applicant preferences is fundamental in many analyses of school-choice data. Application mistakes make this task challenging. We propose a novel approach to deal with the mistakes in a deferred-acceptance matching environment. The key insight is that the uncertainties faced by applicants, e.g., due to tie-breaking lotteries, render some mistakes costly, allowing us to reliably infer relevant preferences. Our approach extracts all information on preferences robustly to payoff-insignificant mistakes. We apply it to school-choice data from Staten Island, NYC. Counterfactual analysis suggests that we underestimate the effects of proposed desegregation reforms when applicants' mistakes are not accounted for in preference inference and estimation.

Abstract: We study the dynamic relationship of school choices across educational stages. Leveraging quasi-random school assignments, we show that attending top-rated middle schools in New York City leads students to match with higher-performing high schools. A dynamic school choice model reveals that 80% of this effect stems from middle schools influencing students' high school applications rather than their admission priorities. Eliminating eligibility restrictions for top-rated middle schools increases the average quality of attended high schools while mitigating racial and income disparities. These efficiency and equity gains increase by 50% when coupled with similar high school admissions reforms.

Abstract: We develop a model of prestige seeking in competitive college admission, where a program’s prestige stems from enabling admitted students to signal their merit via the selectivity of its admissions. The signaling aspect makes prestige endogenous, subject to an equilibrium feedback loop. In equilibrium, applicants “sacrifice” their fits for programs to pursue prestige, which results in a misallocation of program fits. Prestige-seeking also widens the disparity across social groups in access to elite colleges and exacerbates the misallocation of fits across the groups. Several potential remedies against prestige seeking are discussed.

Abstract: We explore the impact of centralized school assignment reforms with a unified framework of households’ residential location choice, school choice, and enrollment decisions. We model households deciding where to live by considering that residential locations determine access to school---admissions probabilities and commuting distances to schools. Households are heterogeneous both in observed and unobserved characteristics, generating rich residential and school segregation patterns. We estimate the model using administrative data from New York City's middle school choice system. Variation from a boundary discontinuity design separately identifies access-to-school preferences from other location amenities. Residential sorting based on access-to-school preference explains 30% of the cross-race gap in test scores of schools students attend. If households' residential locations were fixed, a reform that equalizes admissions probabilities to schools in lower Manhattan would reduce the cross-racial gap by 7%. However, households’ endogenous location choices dampen the effect by half. Households’ opting out of public schools to outside schooling options play a smaller role in evaluating how effectively the reform would reduce the cross-racial gap.