Working Papers

School Choice, Student Sorting and Academic Performance (Job Market Paper) - 2nd round of revisions requested at The Review of Economics and Statistics
This paper examines the general equilibrium effects of school choice on student academic performance. I use the universe of admission and graduation records between 2004 and 2019 from Romanian high schools, where students compete for high school seats of their choice. By exploiting quasi-random differences in the number of schools students can choose from across towns with similar student populations, I generate two main findings: i) having more schools to choose from leads to more sorting by test scores across schools and ii) sorting exacerbates inequalities in academic outcomes between high- and low-scoring students. I confirm these findings using school openings in small towns. A new school opening exacerbates sorting by admission scores across schools and widens achievement gaps. Lastly, I explore the channels underlying these effects. Using random variation in cohort admission scores, I show that peer effects explain part of the widening of test score gaps across schools. Then, I link teacher hiring records and school spending data to show that high-ability teachers sort into more selective schools and boost graduation test scores, while school spending has little effect.​

In progress...

  • ​Intergenerational persistence in the effects of compulsory schooling (with Titus Galama and Kevin Thom)​
  • The equilibrium implications of identity choice: education, passing, and perceptions of the Roma people (with Gabriel Kreindler, Andreea Mitrut and Cristian Pop-Eleches)
  • The determinants and effects of tracking (with Ofer Malamud, Andreea Mitrut, Cristian Pop-Eleches and Miguel Urquiola)
  • The cognitive and non-cognitive effects of high school curriculum: evidence from admissions cutoffs, administrative data, and a large-scale survey of graduating seniors (with Robert Ainsworth, Rajeev Dehejia, Cristian Pop-Eleches and Miguel Urquiola)
  • The effect of high dchool huration on educational attainment and labor market outcomes: evidence from Ontario (with Xian Zhang)

Publications

  • ​Scholtz, Christa, and Andrei Munteanu. "How cooperative is “cooperative federalism”? The political limits to intergovernmental cooperation under a de facto concurrency rule." Constitutional Political Economy (2022): 1-24.