Working Papers
“The Impact of Exam Schools on Disadvantaged Students: Evidence from NYC’s Discovery Program”
Abstract: This paper studies the New York City Department of Education Discovery Program, an affirmative action policy implemented to increase access to some of New York City’s most elite public high schools. The Discovery Program allocates reserve seats at New York City’s exam schools to disadvantaged students who successfully complete the course requirements of a summer program. Using a regression discontinuity design (RDD) and student-level administrative data I estimate the causal impact of exam school admission through the Discovery Program on educational outcomes. I find that while students experience an initial reduction in high school GPA, this negative effect does not persist into later years. Conversely, reserve seat offers increase performance on standardized math test scores. Test score gains are larger for female students, while the initial drop in high school GPA is strongest for male students. Under a counterfactual school assignment match with no reserve seats, I show that exam school displacement as a result of the Discovery Program has no effect on math scores, but boosts high school GPA.
Presented at: AEFP 2025, New York City Independent Budget Office, SEA 2025, University of New Hampshire
Work In Progress
“Universal School Choice and Property Values” (with Carl Kitchens)
“Retrenchment at the Blackboard: How Economic Crises Reshape the Teacher Labor Market” (with Zachary Gooch)
Publications
“Teaching for Large-Scale Reproducibility Verification” (with Lars Vilhuber, Hyuk Son, Meredith Welch, and David Wasser). 2022. Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education, 30(3): 274–281.