Lorenzo Neri

“Should you Meet the Parents?”

In this study, Lorenzo Neri, joint with Elisa Facchetti and Marco Ovidi, examines the impact of information on non-test score attributes on school choice. The researchers exploit an intervention (“Meet The Parents” – MTP) targeting prospective secondary school parents to study whether enrolment choices respond to the provision of hard-to-find information on the “school environment” (e.g., atmosphere, discipline, food quality). Using a difference-in-differences design, the researchers determined that MTP increases the probability of students enrolling at a local state-funded rather than a private school, with larger effects for high socio-economic status and high-ability students. The program generated a substantial increase in financial resources for the state school sector, implying that simple and relatively inexpensive interventions that target prospective parents may weaken concerns about the adverse effects of school choice on educational stratification and inequality.

Mr. Neri’s research interests are in applied microeconomics (mainly labor economics), the economics of education and urban economics. In a joint project with Ludovica Gazze, he is currently studying the effect of changes in environmental quality on children’s life trajectories, linking granular and longitudinal datasets on pupils’ outcomes, pollution, and residential mobility in England. The researchers exploit quasi-experimental changes in pollution given by plants’ openings and closings in a difference-in-differences (DD) design to estimate the impact of changes in environmental quality on student outcomes – including test scores, disciplinary actions, absences, graduation, as well as residential mobility, college and labor market outcomes.

Lorenzo Neri is Assistant Professor at the School of Economics and Finance at the University of St. Andrews. He received a PhD in Economics from Queen Mary University of London in 2020, under the supervision of Prof. Erich Battistin and Dr. Anna Raute. From October 2018 to May 2019, he was a visiting student at the Department of Economics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), under the supervision of Prof. Josh Angrist. He is a Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).