The Spillover Impacts of Charter Schools

This paper estimates spillover impacts of charter schools—how charter school competition causally affects public schools and the students they serve. To do so, we leverage administrative data from Texas and quasi-random variation in exposure to the threat of charter school entry generated by a discontinuity in the approval of applications to open new charter schools around a scoring threshold. This design addresses bias arising from where charter schools choose to locate, which is likely correlated with unobserved determinants of public school outcomes. Preliminary results indicate positive and sizable effects on test scores in nearby public schools. Future work will analyze supporting mechanisms, including the within-school allocation of resources, as well as student-level impacts on educational attainment and earnings.