Abstract: Redrawing School Attendance Boundaries (SABs) is often controversial as parents fear potential negative impacts on their children. However, little is known about how these changes actually affect students' outcomes. This paper studies the effects of changes in SABs on students' educational and labour market outcomes. I find that students who attend high schools with expanding catchments demonstrate improved post-secondary outcomes and higher hourly wages while students who attend high schools with shrinking catchments are unaffected by the change. The observed effects are not attributed to changes in class size, peers, school spending, and facility investment. Instead, the evidence suggests a rise in course offerings and a more specialized focus among teachers. My findings suggest that SAB adjustments may, in contrast to the common controversy surrounding SAB changes, offer long-term benefits for students.

Abstract: We study an education reform resulting in delayed ability tracking for South Korean students during the 1960s-70s. The reform ended a practice of sorting students into elite and non-elite middle schools via admission exams, postponing ability tracking until the high school level. A discontinuity in the probability of students' facing admission exams based on a birth-date cutoff enabled us to identify the causal effect of the reform on short- and long-run outcomes. We find that the reform increased both the incidence of private tutoring as well as hourly wages amongst students from wealthy households. A causal mediation analysis shows that private tutoring is an important pathway for the effect of the reform on university graduation and hourly wage. Our findings suggest that education reforms can interact with household behavior to yield unintended policy outcomes, especially in countries with well-established private tutoring markets.

Abstract: School segregation results from residential sorting as well as policy choices including the redrawing of School Attendance Boundaries (SABs). We examine the impact of SAB adjustments on racial segregation across schools, utilizing two decades of SAB data from Minnesota. Our findings demonstrate that adjustments to SABs do not lead to significant changes in racial segregation across schools. To further investigate whether there exist patterns or systematic preferences that guide school districts in adjusting SABs, we conduct simulations of alternative school boundary changes based on the past proposed plans. By employing a random effects model, we enhance the simulation by predicting students' post-adjustment school choices based on their race and gender. The preliminary findings suggest there are no systematic patterns in school districts' decisions for the SAB adjustment concerning racial segregation. Our study suggests that school districts do not redraw SABs in a manner that exacerbates racial segregation and accordingly, changes in SABs do not significantly impact racial segregation between schools.