Within-School Spillover Effects of Foreclosures and Student Mobility on Student Academic Performance

Abstract

Working with a unique dataset that matches individual student records from Boston Public Schools with real estate records that indicate whether the student lived at an address involved in foreclosure, the authors investigate the degree to which the test scores of students attending high-foreclosure schools suffer, even among students not directly experiencing foreclosure. They also explore the impact on individual test scores of inflows of new students to a school during the school year?both for cases where the inflow was associated with a foreclosure and for cases where the cause of the inflow was not foreclosure.

JEL Classification: G21, I20, I24, J24