Christopher Campos
Assistant Professor of Economics
Biography
Christopher Campos is a labor economist currently focusing on the economics of education. Before pursuing higher education, he served in the United States Marine Corps and served tours in Iraq and Southeast Asia.
Campos received a PhD in Economics from UC Berkeley. Additionally, he earned a BS in Statistics, and a BA in Economics from the University of California, San Diego.
Campos joined Booth in 2022 after spending one year as an Industrial Relations Section Fellow at Princeton University.
Working Papers
REVISION: The Impact of Neighborhood School Choice: Evidence from Los Angeles' Zones of Choice
Date Posted:Tue, 29 Mar 2022 18:01:02 -0500
This paper evaluates the Zones of Choice (ZOC) program in Los Angeles, a school choice initiative that created small high school markets in some neighborhoods but left traditional attendance-zone boundaries in place throughout the rest of the district. We study the impacts of ZOC on student achievement and college enrollment using a matched difference-in-differences design that compares changes in outcomes for ZOC schools and demographically similar non-ZOC schools. Our findings reveal that ZOC has boosted student outcomes markedly, closing achievement and college-enrollment gaps between ZOC neighborhoods and the rest of the district. These gains are largely explained by general improvements in school effectiveness rather than changes in student match quality, and the school-effectiveness gains are concentrated among the lowest-performing schools. We interpret these findings through the lens of a model of school demand in which schools exert costly effort to improve quality. The ...
REVISION: The Impact of Neighborhood School Choice: Evidence from Los Angeles' Zones of Choice
Date Posted:Thu, 13 Jan 2022 11:53:10 -0600
This paper evaluates the Zones of Choice (ZOC) program in Los Angeles, a school choice initiative that created small high school markets in some neighborhoods but left traditional attendance-zone boundaries in place throughout the rest of the district. We study the impacts of ZOC on student achievement and college enrollment using a matched difference-in-differences design that compares changes in outcomes for ZOC schools and demographically similar non-ZOC schools. Our findings reveal that ZOC has boosted student outcomes markedly, closing achievement and college-enrollment gaps between ZOC neighborhoods and the rest of the district. These gains are largely explained by general improvements in school effectiveness rather than changes in student match quality, and the school-effectiveness gains are concentrated among the lowest-performing schools. We interpret these findings through the lens of a model of school demand in which schools exert costly effort to improve quality. The ...
REVISION: The Impacts of Neighborhood School Choice: Evidence from Los Angeles' Zones of Choice
Date Posted:Tue, 08 Jun 2021 07:18:38 -0500
This paper evaluates the Zones of Choice (ZOC) program in Los Angeles, a school choice initiative that created small high school markets in some neighborhoods but left traditional attendance zone boundaries in place throughout the rest of the district. We study the impacts of the ZOC program on student achievement and college enrollment using a matched difference-in-differences design that compares changes in outcomes for ZOC schools and demographically similar non-ZOC schools. Our findings reveal that the ZOC program boosted student outcomes markedly, closing achievement and college enrollment gaps between ZOC neighborhoods and the rest of the district. These gains are explained by general improvements in school effectiveness rather than changes in student match quality, and school-specific gains are concentrated among the lowest-performing schools. We interpret these findings through the lens of a model of school demand in which schools exert costly effort to improve quality. The ...