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Essays in Econometrics of Matching Markets: Identification, Estimation and Practice
Drlje, Marin ; Jurajda, Štěpán (advisor) ; Zimmerman, Seth (referee) ; Le Barbanchon, Thomas (referee)
A large literature estimates various school admission and graduation effects by employing variation in student admission scores around schools' admission cutoffs, assuming (quasi-) random school assignment close to the cutoffs. In this dissertation I focus on this variation, both from the theoretical and practical standpoints. In the first paper, I present evidence suggesting that the samples corresponding to typical applications of regression discontinuity design (RDD) fail to satisfy these assumptions. I distinguish ex-post randomization (as in admission lotteries applicable to those at the margin of admission) from ex-ante randomization, reflecting uncertainty about the market structure of applicants, which can be naturally quantified by resampling from the applicant population. Using data from the Croatian centralized college-admission system, I show that these ex-ante admission probabilities differ dramatically between treated and non-treated students within typical RDD bandwidths. Such unbalanced admission probability distributions suggest that bandwidths (and sample sizes) should be drastically reduced to avoid selection bias. I also show that a sizeable fraction of quasi-randomized assignments occur outside of the typical RDD bandwidths, suggesting that these are also inefficient. As an alternative,...
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