Seminar: Using admission lotteries to estimate heterogeneous effects of elite schools

Secondary-school students in Amsterdam who are placed in the highest academic track, can choose between comprehensive schools that offer multiple tracks and elite schools that exclusively offer the highest track and oblige students to take courses in the classical languages Latin and Greek. The elite schools are popular and therefore often oversubscribed. Assignment is based on admission lotteries, which we use to estimate causal effects. We find that elite schools have negative effects for some students and positive effects for others.