EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Place-Based Policies: Opportunity for Deprived Schools or Zone-and-Shame Effect?

Manon Garrouste and Miren Lafourcade

PSE Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: Even though place-based policies involve large transfers toward low-income neighborhoods, they may also produce territorial stigmatization. This paper appeals to the quasi-experimental discontinuity in a French reform that redrew the zoning map of subsidized neighborhoods on the basis of a sharp poverty cutoff to assess the effect of place-based policies on school enrollment into lower secondary education. Using a difference-indifferences approach, we find strong evidence of stigma from policy designation, as public middle schools in neighborhoods below the policy cutoff , which qualified for place-based subsidies, saw a significant 3.5pp post-reform drop in pupil enrollment, compared to their counterfactual analogues in unlabeled areas lying just above the poverty threshold. This "zone-and-shame" effect is immediate but does not persist, as it is only found for the first pupil-entry cohort in middle schools immediately after the reform. We show that it was triggered by the behavioral reactions of parents from all socioeconomic backgrounds, who avoided public schools in policy areas and shifted to those in other areas or, only for richer parents, to private schools. We uncover, on the contrary, only weak evidence of stigma reversion after an area loses its designation, suggesting hysteresis in bad reputations.

Keywords: School choices; Territorial stigmatization; Redlining; Urban segregation; Sorting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-03899920
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-03899920/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Place-Based Policies: Opportunity for Deprived Schools or Zone-and-Shame Effect? (2023) Downloads
Working Paper: Place-Based Policies: Opportunity for Deprived Schools or Zone-and-Shame Effect? (2022) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:psewpa:halshs-03899920

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in PSE Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().

 
Page updated 2023-04-06
Handle: RePEc:hal:psewpa:halshs-03899920