Laia Navarro-Sola to publish in Restud

“What is a Good School, and Can Parents Tell? Evidence on the Multidimensionality of School Output” accepted for publication in top 5 economics journal The Review of Economic Studies.

Laia Navarro-Sola

Laia (together with Diether W. Beuermann, Inter-American Development Bank, C. Kirabo Jackson, Northwestern University and Francisco Pardo, University of Texas at Austin) look at how parents rate schools and why they rank them the way they do. Their results show that school choices among parents of low-achieving students are relatively more strongly related to schools’ impacts on non-test-score outcomes, while the opposite is true for parents of high-achieving students, which suggests that evaluations based solely on test scores may be misleading about the benefits of school choice (particularly for low-achieving students), and education interventions more broadly.

They exploit plausibly exogenous school assignments and data from Trinidad and Tobago to estimate the causal impacts of individual schools on several outcomes. Schools’ impacts on high-stakes tests are weakly related to impacts on important outcomes such as arrests, dropout, teen motherhood, and formal labor-market participation. 

To examine if parents’ school preferences are related to these causal impacts, they link them to parents’ ranked lists of schools and employ discrete-choice models to infer preferences for schools. 

Parents choose schools that improve high-stakes tests even conditional on peer quality and average outcomes. Parents also choose schools that reduce criminality and teen motherhood, and increase labor-market participation. 

The paper has been accepted for publication in the Review of Economic Studies (Restud) – one of the top 5 most prestigious economics journals in the world.

Click here to read the paper on the Restud web

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