Essays on school choice, information, and textbook fundin

The second chapter examines the impact of information about school quality on student enrollment. I use a regression discontinuity design to estimate the effects of a school choice program in California that provides families with signals of low school quality. I find that signals of low quality decrease school enrollment by 14.3% relative to enrollment in the previous year and 23.6% over two years. Despite the large changes in enrollment, student demographics are not affected. Additionally, the effects of school-quality signals are largest when families have alternative school choices that are nearby. I also find some evidence that student achievement in elementary schools declines, although I cannot separately identify the degree to which this is caused by changes in student composition.;The third chapter examines the effect of textbook funding on student performance. Evidence on the effects of school resources on student achievement is mixed, but quasi-experimental methods suggest that interventions like class size reductions improve student achievement. This is the first study to consider the effect of textbook funding on student achievement by using a quasi-experimental setting in the U.S. I focus on a large class action lawsuit in California that provided a one-time payment of $96.90 per student for textbooks if schools fell below a threshold of academic performance in the previous year. Exploiting this variation with a regression discontinuity design, I find that textbook funding has significant positive effects on student achievement. The low cost of textbooks relative to class size reduction implies that these effects have a very high benefit-per-dollar.