Social Interactions, Information, and Preferences for Schools: Experimental Evidence from Los Angeles

I am thankful to Chris Walters and Jesse Rothstein for their extensive support and guidance. I thank Marianne Bertrand, Michael Dinerstein, John Friedman, Caroline Hoxby, Anders Humlum, Larry Katz, Tomas Larroucau, Jacob Leshno, Paco Martorell, Todd Messer, Pablo Muñoz, Derek Neal, Chris Neilson, Matt Notowidigdo, Canice Prendergast, Miguel Urquiola, and Seth Zimmerman for helpful comments. I also thank seminar participants at Boston University, Duke University, Harvard University, Michigan State University, RAND, Stanford University, Teachers College at Columbia, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Merced, University of Chile, University of Illinois-Chicago, Yale University, and conference participants at the 2022 Southern Economic Association Annual Meeting, the 2023 AEA Annual Meeting, the Northeast Labor Symposium for Early Career Economists, and the Transitions to Secondary and Higher Education Workshop. I gratefully acknowledge support from the Biehler Junior Faculty Fellowship. Connor Fogal, Jack Johnson, Ryan Lee, and Anh Tran provided outstanding research assistance. This work would not be possible without the support of Dunia Fernandez, Kathy Hayes, Rakesh Kumar, and Bryan Moncada. All remaining errors are my own. The trial was registered in the AEA RCT Registry as study #AEARCTR-0004844 and received IRB approval from the University of California Berkeley and the University of Chicago. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• data appendix
• randomized controlled trials registry entry

• September 26, 2024