When Do Informational Interventions Work? Experimental Evidence from New York City High School Choice

We are grateful to the research assistants and staff who made this field experiment possible and contributed to the research: Christine Baker-Smith, Stewart Burns Wade, Sherene Alexander, Alexandra Bray, Duwa Alebdy, Andrea Cornejo, Alex Clothier, Florangel DeLeon, Erin Huffer, Shaked Landor, Dhanya Madugalle, Marina Makram, Zach Malter, Katherine Parham, Barkat Sikder, Eric Sturm, and Hailey Vogel. Conference participants at the APPAM and AEFP Conferences provided helpful comments. Special thanks go to Alex Eble and Leslie Kern for their feedback. We thank the Smith-Richardson Foundation for financial support. We thank Jim Kemple and the Research Alliance for New York City Schools, which enabled access to NYC administrative data. Additional funding for the NYC High School Admissions Study came from the Heckscher Foundation for Children, the NYU Institute for Human Development and Social Change, the Spencer Foundation, and the William T. Grant Foundation. Staff at the NYCDOE enrollment office provided helpful feedback, in particular Nadiya Chadha, Lianna Wright, and Stewart Burns Wade. This study is registered in the AEA RCT Registry and the identifying number is: AEARCTR-0003736. The study was determined as exempt from human subjects review by the Institutional Review Boards at NYU, Teachers College, and the NYC Department of Education. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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