European Center for Advanced Research in Economics and Statistics

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Title ; The Effect of Affirmative Action on Targeted and Non-Targeted Students: Evidence from Low-income Priorities in Paris High Schools, written with Julien Grenet and Yinghua He

Abstract : Since 2008, school choice in Paris has an income-based affirmative action component giving low-income students preferential treatment in high school admissions. This policy is implemented through a centralized school choice process that assigns students to public schools. Students' priorities are determined by a point system that takes into account students' academic performance and their district of residence. Low-income students, who make up about 20 percent of high school freshmen, receive in addition a large bonus that gives them full priority at all public high schools in their district. Using comprehensive administrative data, we use the implementation of this bonus in 2008 as a natural experiment to examine the effects of income-based affirmative action on high school outcomes and college access for both targeted and non-targeted students.

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Title : An Axiomatization of the Random Priority Rule

Abstract : We study the problem of assigning indivisible objects to agents where each is to receive one object. To ensure fairness in the absence of monetary compensation, we consider random assignments. Random Priority, also known as Random Serial Dictatorship, is the only mechanism that satisfies (i) fairness in the sense of equal-treatment-of-equals, (ii) ex post efficiency, and (iii) probabilistic (Maskin) monotonicity -- whenever preferences change so that a given deterministic assignment is ranked weakly higher by all agents, the probability of that assignment being chosen should be weakly larger. Probabilistic monotonicity implies strategy-proofness for random assignment problems and is equivalent on a general social choice domain; for deterministic rules it coincides with Maskin monotonicity.

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Title  : The Dynamics of Agricultural Production

Abstract : Agricultural productivity is low in rural economies compared to that of developed economies, and there is disparity in measured productivity across farms. The dispersion of measured productivity might reflect (i) volatile conditions and (ii) sluggish adjustments in agricultural production to such conditions, e.g., due to market frictions or technological constraints. This paper sheds light on the existence and nature of such imperfect adjustments by measuring the adjustment of production (factors, inputs and cropping patterns) to large shocks affecting the returns to different crops, and by estimating a dynamic structural model of farm production. We use the model to quantify the extent to which market frictions and technological constraints respectively limit the ability of farmers to adjust their production to changing conditions. We find that both technological and market frictions are quantitatively relevant, the latter implying that a significant part of sluggish adjustments can be interpreted as misallocation in factors and in cropping patterns