Applied Economics Lunch Seminar

Du 08/03/2022 de 12:30 à 13:30

Salle R1.09 PSE

SOUIDI Youssef (PSE)

Is the redrawing of catchment areas an effective tool for fighting against school segregation? Evidence from France

Default school assignment is often set through catchment areas. Usually drawn around schools, they are likely to reflect residential sorting. This paper focuses on the French context, where one third of students bypass the default assignment by resorting to opt-out options. Using novel geographic information data, I first show that neighboring schools sometimes dramatically differ in the social composition of their catchment area. It suggests that, despite residential sorting and current school siting, there is room for reducing segregation across schools' recruitment pools. In the second part of the paper, I evaluate the causal impact of a change in catchment areas’ boundaries on families’ short-term behavioral reactions using a difference-in-differences strategy. Preliminary results show that changing such boundaries does not necessarily translate into more socially diverse schools. I find that, when assigned a lower performing school, both high-SES and low-SES families react by using opt-out options, but behavioral reactions are much stronger for high-SES families.