Work in progress

We provide evidence that school-based compensatory education policies create sorting effects, by analyzing a French program, which targeted low-achieving and socially disadvantaged junior high schools. We use geocoded original data, and a regression discontinuity framework to show that the program decreases the individual probability to attend a treated school, and symmetrically increases the probability to attend a private school. The effects are driven by pupils from high socio-economic backgrounds, resulting in an increase in social segregation across schools.

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.

Student evaluation of teaching is increasingly used in higher education institutions. In this paper, we exploit an original data set that contains the results and evaluations for almost 100 courses during 7 school years in a French "grande école". We analyze the relationship between grades and student evaluations using teacher fixed effects and instrumental variables methods in order to rule out any simultaneity and endogeneity bias. We also exploit variation in the date when students evaluate teaching to analyze the dynamics of evaluations. We find that students take their exam grade into account when they evaluate teaching and that a better grade is associated with a better evaluation of teacher’s pedagogy. However the size of the effect is small. We also find that students use contemporaneous information when evaluating teaching.