School Access and City Structure

Abstract

The location choices of households with children connect housing, labor, and school markets. These connections may shape the city structure, access to opportunities and the outcome of policies addressing each market separately. To study the consequences of these connections, I develop a quantitative spatial model that incorporates school choice. Parents with different skills select their residence by balancing access to schools and employment, choose a school considering its endogenous peer composition, and compete with childless households for houses and jobs. I use data from Madrid on school admissions and workers' commuting trips to estimate preferences for schools and workplaces. Combining households' location data with exogenous variation from the city's historical expansion, I estimate neighborhood preferences separately from endogenous school quality. I find that school access influences residential and job choices, decreasing segregation across parents by 15% and shifting workers towards productive areas. However, the opposite relocation of non-parents increases overall segregation. Work commuting costs concentrate skilled households in central locations, increasing school quality differences for students from high and low-skill families by 2.6% through peer effects. Finally, I show that interactions between schools and the labor market shape the effects of work-from-home and school transportation policies.