This is a lunch seminar - lunch is on the house.

Please sign up by email to Mette Vad Andersen if you wish to participate.

Abstract: A common policy to affect student composition is to redraw school attendance boundaries. Yet, redrawing only works if households comply and enroll in the designated school. Employing a novel dataset with unprecedented detail, we exploit changes over time in schools' geographic attendance boundaries to provide causal estimates of how school characteristics affect compliance with the assigned school. Households defy reassignments to schools with children from less resourceful families by enrolling in other public schools. The response to changes in school composition has a strong social gradient: resourceful households respond more to changes in school composition. We apply a boundary discontinuity design to characterize non-compliance through private school enrollment and residential relocation in the long term and once again document a strong social gradient. Our findings imply that attendance boundary policies have limited scope for desegregating schools.