You are kindly invited to de Economics Department's seminar, where it will be presented the article called "Increasing Capacity at elite High Schools under Centralized Assigments".

Presents: Cristian Sanchez, Senior Economist, Central Bank Chile.

Coauthors: Arturo Aguilar, Adrián Martínez, Jorge Pérez

This paper studies the distributional effects of increasing capacity at high-performing high schools in the context of centralized school choice. We leverage a natural experiment in the implementation of the centralized high school assignment in Mexico City in 2017, where unexpectedly UNAM prepas were assigned 12% more students than their capacity. We show an important cascading effect in the equilibrium assignment due to the centralized nature of the assigment, where for every seat added in UNAM prepas, around 9 students were reassigned overall. Furthermore, we show that peer composition changed in about 85% of schools. In general, reassigned students experimented increases in the ability composition of their peers, while "stayers" experimented the opposite, impacting some of their educational outcomes.

The event will be held in a 1605 classroom.

Kind regards,

Research Direction