Influence of the local social environment on schooling decisions – ILSESD
Submission summary
Education is not only a learning process but also a decision process in the sense that, throughout the education path, individuals have to choose which school to enroll at, which track to follow, or which class to attend. These decisions intervene very early during the education process. At that age, the local environment is expected to have a great influence. In this context, France is among the countries where social reproduction in school is the highest. In order to better understand social reproduction in school and to design the policies that would best contend with it, it is crucial to measure the causal influence of the social and academic environment throughout the individual education process. To meet this overall objective, this project will proceed with three questions. First, what is the effect of neighborhood peers on track choices? Second, what is the impact of urban policies on school choices? Third, what is the impact of the overlap between urban and education policies?
Partner
LEM Lille - Economie et Management
Help of the ANR
220 115 euros
Duration of the scientific project
Beginning: April 2022 - 48 Months
Publications
Place-Based Policies: A Path to Opportunity or a Mark of Stigma for Targeted Neighborhoods?, Garrouste, M., Lafourcade, M. (Univ. Paris Saclay, PSE) - Latest version - forthcoming Journal of the European Economic Association
Résumé
Even though place-based policies involve large transfers toward low-income neighborhoods, they may also produce territorial stigmatization by spotlighting the targeted areas. This paper appeals to the quasi-experimental discontinuity in a French reform that redrew the zoning map of subsidized neighborhoods on the basis of a sharp poverty cut-off to assess the “net" effect of place-based policies on school outcomes. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find strong evidence of stigma effects from policy designation on public middle schools located in neighborhoods below the policy cut-off, which saw a significant decrease in their post-reform pupil enrollment compared to their counterfactual analogues in unlabeled areas lying just above the poverty threshold. This "zone-and-shame" effect is immediate, it persists up to five years after the reform, and it is triggered by the reactions of parents from all socioeconomic backgrounds, who avoided public schools in policy areas and shifted to those in other areas or, only for wealthy parents, to private schools. There is also evidence of a short-lived decrease in pupils’ test-scores associated with this spatial resorting. We uncover, on the contrary, only weak evidence of stigma reversion after an area loses its designation, suggesting hysteresis in bad reputations conveyed by policy labeling.