Work in progress

In this paper we study the effect of a change in local school supply on pupils' track choice at the end of lower secondary education. We use high school openings to highlight the constraint local school supply exerts on individual schooling decisions. Our data set covers all pupils enrolled in 9th grade between the school year 2002-2003 and the school year 2011-2012 in mainland France. For those pupils we observe what track they follow in 10th grade. We are able to precisely locate both middle schools and high schools and identify new high schools. Our estimation strategy (generalized difference in differences) takes advantage of the variation in time and space of the openings of high schools to estimate the causal effect of an increase in school supply on the allocation of pupils at the end of 9th grade. We show that, when a new high school appears in the neighbourhood of a middle school, the proportion of pupils who continue in high school increases significantly. This increase is due to a larger proportion of pupils going to the vocational track.

This paper assesses students objectivity in their evaluations of teaching, by analyzing the relationship between their grades and evaluations, and the dynamics of evaluations over time. We exploit an original data set from almost 100 courses during 7 academic years in a French higher education institution. We use generalized additive model, teacher fixed effects and instrumental variables estimations to rule out any simultaneity or endogeneity bias. We find that students take their exam grade into account when they evaluate teaching. A better grade is associated with a better evaluation of teacher’s pedagogy, although the size of the effect is small. We also find that students give lower evaluations after the exam and higher evaluations after getting their grades.