Exogenous Boundary Redistricting for Sorting Control

In Simple Words

Imagine a city redrawing municipal borders overnight so that families living in identical houses suddenly find themselves assigned to completely different local services. This abrupt administrative change breaks the link between where families chose to live and their default assigned service, revealing true preferences independent of location choice.

Research question

Estimating consumer preferences for spatial amenities is confounded by residential sorting, as households choose residential locations specifically to access preferred neighborhood schools. This endogenous sorting inflates estimated preferences for physical proximity relative to institutional quality.

Participants

N = 36,887 human students in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, North Carolina; redistricting affected home-school assignments for 43% of elementary, 52% of middle, and 35% of high school parcels.

Study Design

Quasi-experimental estimation comparing choice parameters on the subsample of students exogenously reassigned to new home-schools under court-ordered unitary status against non-reassigned students.

Results

Estimated choice parameters for driving distance, home-school preference, and test scores in the reassigned subsample were quantitatively and qualitatively similar to the full sample (middle school distance parameters -0.255 vs -0.234 for white non-lunch students), confirming that residential sorting does not drive preference estimates.

Takeaway

Isolate spatial proximity preferences from endogenous location decisions by estimating demand models on subsamples undergoing exogenous assignment boundary shifts.

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