(Job Market Paper)

Abstract: A question at the heart of much of the policy debate on public education is how to get more for less. Charter schools have been a tool in this arena to pressure traditional public schools to improve or lose students to them. Moreover, charter schools designated as ``High-performing" have recently been allowed to expand capacity at will in Florida, while the remainder need to request for such permission. I leverage this policy reform and evaluate its influence on education access and quality. I develop and estimate a tractable dynamic model that highlights both the (costly) adjustment of schools' capacity and their  ``effort'' to improve quality, as well as their dynamic response to competitive pressure. I find evidence that obtaining ``High-performing" designation reduces adjustment costs of capacity, which is valuable to charter schools. More importantly, such charter schools exert pressure on traditional public schools nearby. In the simulation, I show that targeting value-added, not just performance level, would improve the mean performance of the entire education sector and enhance equity of access.

with Emilio Gutierrez,  Beata Javorick, Wolfgang Keller,  Ricardo Miranda, Kensuke Teshima,  James Tybout

Synopsis: We study the impact of retail globalization on calorie consumption under alternative policy regimes. Specifically, using household-level surveys and home scanner data, we first examine the effects of Walmart openings in Mexican cities on household consumption patterns. In doing so, we document an eight percent permanent increase in households' purchased calories that coincides with the timing of Walmart openings, and we show that this increase traces to greater consumption of unhealthy foods. Next, we show that when Mexico introduced a tax on highly caloric foods in 2014, caloric intake fell among Walmart shoppers, who substituted for cheaper and healthier food options. Finally, building on Thomassen et al. (American Economic Review, 2017), we estimate a structural model of households' choices concerning the stores they visit and the goods they consume. This model provides a basis for counterfactual analyses of calorie taxes (inter alia), and it allows us to link changes in caloric intake among different types of households to Walmart openings.

Note: Counterfactual simulation in progress.