In this paper, I compare two reforms that raised the minimum school‐leaving age to 16 in France (1967) and in England and Wales (1972). Using a regression discontinuity design, I find that while the reform in England and Wales led to a 6−7 percent increase in hourly wages per additional year of compulsory schooling, the impact of the change to French law was close to zero. The results suggest that the major difference between the two reforms was that the fraction of individuals holding no qualifications dropped sharply after the introduction of the new minimum school‐leaving age in England and Wales, whereas it remained unchanged in France.

In this paper, we investigate how housing prices react to the quality of education offered by neighboring public and private schools. The organization of secondary schooling in the city of Paris, which combines residence-based assignment to public schools with a well-developed and almost entirely publicly funded private school system, offers a valuable empirical context for analyzing how private schools affect the capitalization of public school performance in housing prices. Using comprehensive data on both schools and real estate transactions over the period 1997-2004, we develop a matching framework to carefully compare sales across school attendance boundaries. We find that a standard deviation increase in public school performance raises housing prices by 1.4 to 2.4%. Moreover, we show that the capitalization of public school performance in the price of real estate shrinks as the availability of private schools increases in the neighborhood. Our results confirm the predictions of general equilibrium models of school choice that private schools, by providing an advantageous outside option to parents, tend to mitigate the impact of public school performance on housing prices

CpSq ¡ CpS ¡ 1q. For such students, σ ST T is a dominated strategy, dominated by dropping r S i and submitting pr 1 i , . . . , r S i q. In other words, σ ST T is not an equilibrium strategy for these students.In fact, σ ST T is not an equilibrium strategy for more student types, given others playing σ ST T . If a student drops an arbitrary school s and submits a partial true preference order L i of length pS ¡ 1q, the saved cost of is CpSq ¡ CpS ¡ 1q, while the associated foregone benefit is at most u i,s ³ a s L i , e i ; σ ST T ¡i pθ ¡i q, e ¡i¨d Gpθ ¡i q. The saved cost can exceed the forgone benefit because the latter can be close to zero when s tends to have cutoff much higher than e i,s or when i can be almost certainly accepted by more desirable schools, given that everyone else plays STT. When it is the case, i deviates from STT.The above arguments can be extended to any non-zero application cost.Proof of Lemma 1.The sufficiency of the first statement is implied by the strategy-proofness of DA and by DA producing a stable matching when everyone is STT. That is, STT is a dominant strategy

Using comprehensive administrative data on France's single largest financial aid program, this paper provides new evidence on the impact of large-scale need-based grant programs on the college enrollment decisions, persistence and graduation rates of low-income students. We exploit sharp discontinuities in the grant eligibility formula to identify the impact of aid on student outcomes at di↵erent levels of study. We find that eligibility for an annual cash allowance of 1,500 euros increases college enrollment rates by up to 5 percentage points. Moreover, we show that need-based grants have positive e↵ects on student persistence and degree completion.JEL Classification: H52, I22, I28, J24, J38

No abstract