UPDATED SPEAKER! Fall 2023 BU Wheelock Ed Policy Speaker Series: Christopher Campos (University of Chicago)

Christopher Campos is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he currently focuses on research on the economics of education. He is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Talk Title: Social Interactions and Preferences for Schools: Experimental Evidence from Los Angeles

This paper studies how parents’ preferences for schools are affected by information about school and peer quality and how social interactions mediate changes in demand. I design an information intervention that cross-randomizes whether parents receive information about school quality (school value-added) and peer quality. Using a spillover design that varies the saturation of information across schools, I also randomize parents’ proximity to other parents with similar information. I find that the information leads to changes in parental preferences toward higher value-added schools, and this occurs when both parents and their neighbors receive information. These results imply substantial information spillovers. I complement this evidence with survey data on the distribution of beliefs over school and peer quality and conclude that the direct and spillover effects of my experiment come primarily from changes in parental preferences rather than an updating of parental beliefs in response to information. These findings show that when parents are informed about school and peer quality, their social interactions lead to changes in preferences in a way that rewards more effective schools.