“When Geography Shapes Preferences: Redesigning Teacher Assignment in Italy”, with
Battal Dogan.
[PDF]
We investigate Italy’s centralized teacher assignment system where teachers can
rank “geographical regions”, leading to ties in their rank order lists (ROLs). We show
that the way ties in teachers’ ROLs are resolved in the current assignment mechanism
systematically violates teachers’ priority rights and results in justified envy. We propose
a new mechanism, Deferred Acceptance with Hierarchical Choice (DA-HC), which is
strategy-proof, eliminates justified envy, and Pareto improves over the benchmark deferred
acceptance mechanism with simple tie-breaking (DA-STB). Using administrative data,
we provide evidence that DA-HC can potentially bring significant welfare improvements
over the benchmark DA-STB.
“Best Paper Award” and “Exemplary Track Paper Award in Applied Modeling” at the 25th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (2024)
Proceedings of the 25th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (2024)[PDF Extended Abstract]
Most secondary schools in England are able to design the rules for which pupils
have priority when the school is over-subscribed.
This could be positive or negative for inclusivity, depending on schools’ choices.
In this context, we study the detailed rules for each secondary school in England.
Our main findings are that, first, geography (still) determines admission to most
over-subscribed schools. This matters for social mobility, as some households
are priced out of high performing schools due to higher property prices around
the school. Second, despite explicit financial incentives, only a small minority
of schools give priority to pupils eligible for the Pupil Premium, and this
priority is meaningful only in a few dozen schools. Third, the few schools
with ‘innovative’ admissions arrangements could inspire other schools to implement
feasible ‘tried and tested’ reforms. Free schools appear to be leading
these ‘innovative’ admissions arrangements. Finally, in the complex system of
multiple school types and diverse admissions arrangements, parents in some areas
lack the required information to make informed school choices.
Publications
“Lost in Translation: Reading and Math Performance of Second-Generation Immigrant Children in Italy”,
with Giuseppe Russo,
Journal of Human Capital , Volume 19, Number 1, 2025, [Paper].
[PDF (WP Version)]
This paper explores the effect of language proficiency on Math achievement for ten-year-old
second-generation immigrant children in Italian primary schools. Especially for these children, proficiency
in the host country language is the prerequisite for the acquisition of any other skill. However, using an
instrumental variable strategy that exploits the heterogeneity in birth dates and the variation in linguistic
distances, we find that they face a trade-off between learning Italian and learning Math. The linguistic
literature offers an explanation based on the existence of a language proficiency threshold that must be
crossed to understand the classes. On this basis, we develop a simple model of skill production that provides
theoretical foundations for our results and a unified framework for interpreting the mixed findings in the
literature. We present empirical evidence that the trade-off arises when proficiency is below the threshold
commonly adopted to indicate a sufficient command of the Italian language, which happens for 59% of
our sample. Enabling these children to catch up requires substantial investments in education since, when
a sufficiency threshold must be crossed, marginal improvements are ineffective, rendering the proficiency
gap permanent and fostering social exclusion and inequality.