Time: 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm, June 30th, 2026
Speaker: Chao Fu (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Venue: Zhifuxuan Classroom, Langrun Garden, Peking University
Abstract:
Education, as a process of producing student outcomes, requires extensive interaction between the school and the enrollee. Therefore, the match quality between the school and the enrollee---how well schools' specialties and students' needs are aligned—-can be important for student outcomes. Moreover, carefully designed student-school assignment mechanisms, by allocating students to their well-matched schools, can improve overall student achievement cost-effectively. For an assignment mechanism to achieve such efficiency gains, it requires that households have information about which schools better match their needs and that their preferences for those schools are respected. However, acquiring and processing information can be costly for households, which hampers efficient student-school assignment. Using administrative data combined with data from a survey we conducted in New York City, we study the importance of student-school match quality in producing students' outcomes, the design of low-cost information interventions, and their interaction with the design of assignment mechanisms.
Speaker:
Chao Fu is Professor of Economics and Mary Claire Aschenbrener Phipps Distinguished Chair in Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010. Her research focuses on labor economics, empirical microeconomics, and the economics of education. Her work has appeared in leading economics journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Labor Economics, and International Economic Review. Since July 2024, she has served as Co-Editor of Quantitative Economics.