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While school choice has been well studied, there is little existing research exploring the role of transportation, in general, and school buses, in particular, to school choice decisions. We examine the effect of school buses on school choice decisions using data on kindergarten students and their eligibility for transportation assistance in New York City public schools in 2017. Using both conditional logit school choice models and regression discontinuity designs, we provide both descriptive and credibly causal evidence on the impact of school proximity, bus eligibility, and their interaction on school choice decisions. Our results indicate that proximity and buses both matter. Specifically, while distance significantly deters choice, school bus eligibility increases the likelihood of choosing a school by 1.4-4 percentage points (or 12-30 percent). Compared to a high-quality school, we find that bus eligibility has twice as large an impact on reducing the negative distance effect in the 0.5 to 1 mile range from school (27 versus 12 percent). These results will be useful for policy makers looking to leverage school transportation policy to improve school choice decisions, and ultimately student outcomes.

Although rearranging school organizational features is a popular school reform, little research exists to inform policymakers about how grade spans affect achievement. This article examines how grade spans and the school transitions that students make between fourth and eighth grade shape student performance in eighth grade. The authors estimate the impact of grade span paths on eighth-grade performance, controlling for school and student characteristics and correcting for attrition bias and quality of original school. They find that students moving from K-4 to 5-8 schools or in K-8 schools outperform students on other paths. Results suggest four possible explanations for the findings--the number and timing of school changes, the size of within-school cohorts, and the stability of peer cohorts. (Contains 11 tables and 21 notes.)

Reorganizing primary school grade spans is a tractable and relatively inexpensive school reform. However, assessing the effects of reorganization requires also examining other organizational changes that may accompany grade span reforms. Using data on New York City public schools from 1996 to 2002 and exploiting within-school variations, we examine relationships among grade span, spending, and size. We find that school grade span is associated with differences in school size, class size, and grade size, though generally not with spending and other resources. In addition, we find class size and grade size differences in the same grade level at schools with different configurations, suggesting that school grade span affects not only school size but also class size and grade size. We find few relationships, though, between grade span and school-level performance, pointing to the need to augment these analyses with pupil-level data. We conclude with implications for research and practice.

The impact of peers on student outcomes has important policy implications for how students are organized into classes and the overall impact of education interventions. But it is difficult to accurately measure peer effects because of the nonrandom sorting of students and teachers into classrooms and the endogeneity of peers' achievement. In this study, an education production function (EPF) is specified that includes student and peer characteristics as regressors. This model is estimated using student-level data from New York City public schools for 1995-2000. The richness of these data allows six sources of bias that arise in the EPF model to be addressed, including the above-mentioned nonrandom classroom assignment and the endogeneity of peers' achievement. This results in credible evidence of (small) peer group effects. Instrumenting for the mean of peers' achievement significantly reduces the associated peer effect. Nonlinear peer group effects are evident in the form of a small positive impact associated with the homogeneity of peers' achievement. Generally, peer characteristics do not appear to affect individual performance. Also included in this analysis is an application of a new methodology developed by Graham (2007) that identifies peer group effects through their impact on the variance in classroom mean test scores. The approach is less susceptible to the six biases that plague the EPF approach. The evidence from this exercise indicates that peer group effects are present and corroborates the results from the EPF approach.

State and federal accountability reforms are putting considerable pressure on schools to increase the achievement of historically low-performing groups of students and to close test score gaps. In this article, we exploit the differences among the large number of elementary schools in New York City to examine how much schools vary in the efficiency of the education they provide to subgroups. In addition, we examine the extent to which observable school characteristics can account for the variation that exists. We find that New York City elementary schools vary in how well they educate poor students compared to nonpoor students and Asian and White students compared to Black and Hispanic students. The disparities in school efficiency measures between boys and girls are lower than for the other subgroups. There is no conclusive evidence about which school resources and characteristics are associated with more or less efficient education across all subgroups.

Comparisons of the Cox, Wald, and J tests are conducted under a standard framework and in a misspecified setting - the data generation process includes a regressor that is not in either model. Most power comparisons have been carried out for 'local alternatives' but comparisons under a 'nonlocal alternatives' framework using the method of approximate slopes developed by Bahadur (1960, 1967) are made in this paper. Monte Carlo experiments are conducted and the Cox test is shown to have the highest small sample power and approximate slope for most of the cases considered. The results from response surface regressions provide strong evidence that the approximate slope is a good predictor of the small power of nonnested tests. It is also useful for directly comparing the small sample power of one degree of freedom tests of nonnested hypotheses.

The availability of information on houses in panel data studies like the American Housing Survey (AHS) and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) provides valuable sources for estimation of [...]

We contribute to the literature on house price diffusion by carrying out our analysis at three levels: CBSA (nationwide), town and census tract (Greater Boston Area). We estimate fixed‐effect models of house price growth on lagged growth ("Persistence"), nearby lagged growth ("Spillovers") and Fundamentals growth. CBSA‐level Persistence and Spillover Effects are positive and significant. These large ripple/contagion effects likely contributed to the recent national‐level housing downturn. We find evidence of smaller town‐level Persistence and Spillover Effects. Hence, diffusion appears stronger across than within housing markets. Fundamentals and price expectations drive price diffusion, leaving room for bubbles from future price overoptimism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is required to designate critical habitat (CH) for listed species. Designation could result in modification to or delay of residential development projects within habitat boundaries, generating concern over potential housing market impacts. This paper draws upon a large data set of municipal-level (FIPS) building permit issuances and critical habitat designations (CHDs) in California over a 13-year period to identify changes in the spatial and temporal pattern of development activity associated with CHD. We find that the proposal of the mediansized CH results in a 23.5 percent decrease in the supply of housing permits in the short run and a 37.0 percent decrease in the long run. The results indicate the proposal of CH acts as a signal that all development in that FIPS will be more costly. We also find that the impact varies across the two periods in which CH is designated and by the number of years relative to when CH was first proposed.

The recent slump notwithstanding, substantial increases in house prices in many parts of the United States have served to highlight housing affordability for moderate-income households, especially in high-cost, supply-constrained coastal cities such as Boston. In this article, we develop a new measure of area affordability that characterizes the supply of housing that is affordable to different households in different locations of a metropolitan region. Key to our approach is the explicit recognition that the price/rent of a dwelling is affected by its location. Hence, we develop an affordability methodology that accounts for job accessibility, school quality and safety. This allows us to produce a menu of town-level indexes of adjusted housing affordability. The adjustments are based on obtaining implicit prices of these amenities from a hedonic price equation. We thus use data from a wide variety of sources to rank 141 towns in the greater Boston metropolitan area based on their adjusted affordability. Taking households earning 80% of area median income as an example, we find that consideration of town-level amenities leads to major changes relative to a typical assessment of affordability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

State and federal accountability reforms are putting considerable pressure on schools to increase the achievement of historically low-performing groups of students and to close test score gaps. In this article, we exploit the differences among the large number of elementary schools in New York City to examine how much schools vary in the efficiency of the education they provide to subgroups. In addition, we examine the extent to which observable school characteristics can account for the variation that exists. We find that New York City elementary schools vary in how well they educate poor students compared to nonpoor students and Asian and White students compared to Black and Hispanic students. The disparities in school efficiency measures between boys and girls are lower than for the other subgroups. There is no conclusive evidence about which school resources and characteristics are associated with more or less efficient education across all subgroups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]