"How Family Preferences Structure Education Markets: A Network Approach"

School choice has been one of the most prevalent education reforms of the last three decades. In a school choice system, the structure of the marketplace is governed by families’ preferences for schools, their enrollment decisions, and schools’ responses to these decisions. While researchers have given significant attention to families’ preferences and the extent to which families value academic performance generally, there has been significantly less work on how preferences shape competition between specific schools. In this study, I examine the direct implications of family preferences for how competitive pressures structure the New York City high school marketplace. Using network analysis techniques and the applications of tens of thousands of students, I explore how the market is structured and what explains competitive relationships between schools. Additionally, given ongoing concerns about commonly used measures of school competition, I compare my preference-based measures to geographic and market share proxies. 

"Identifying (Sub)Market Structures in Centralized School Choice Ecosystems: Implications for Equity"

Much of the quantitative school choice literature has focused on the effect of school choice-induced competition on student outcomes. In each study, the researchers must identify the boundaries of the educational market, identify which schools pose an enrollment threat to another, and quantify the amount of competition an individual school faces prior to modeling effects. Yet unlike research on markets in other industries, studies in education often rely on geography alone to identify competitors. Applying work from organizational ecology, I use student applications to construct a complex network of competition and I identify naturally occurring submarkets, where within-submarket competition is far stronger than across submarket competition. Results from community detection algorithms suggest significant horizontal and vertical differentiation, with family preferences separating schools with homogenous characteristics, and sometimes student bodies, into distinct submarkets. Implications for equity are discussed. 

"Families' School Preferences and Principals' Perceptions of Competition in NYC" (with Dr. Sean P. Corcoran)

In order for school choice policies to improve student outcomes writ large, school leaders must perceive they are under competitive pressure and act strategically to improve their services to attract families. A school's position in the market hierarchy is determined by families' preferences and enrollment decisions. Surprisingly, little research has compared family revealed preferences to principals' perceptions of competition to understand how sensitive school leaders are to families' market signals. Using family revealed preferences for specific schools on rank-ordered high school applications and a unique survey of high school principals, we explore to what extent high school leaders identify schools often ranked above them on the same applications as competitors. We also explore what factors explain what schools are commonly ranked as competitors and what individual characteristics are associated with school leader perceptions.