Christopher Campos

5807 South Woodlawn Ave

Chicago, IL 60637

I am an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. I am also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

Before pursuing higher education, I served in the United States Marine Corps and served tours in Iraq and Southeast Asia. I received my PhD in Economics from UC Berkeley in 2021 and spent one year as a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Industrial Relations Section at Princeton University.

Email: Christopher.Campos@chicagobooth.edu

Selected Research

Who Benefits from Remote Schooling? Self-selection and Match Effects

Bruhn, Jesse, Campos, Christopher, and Chyn, Eric

Revising

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We study the distributional effects of remote learning. Our approach combines newly collected data on parental preferences with administrative data from Los Angeles. The preference data allow us to account for selection into remote learning while also studying selection patterns and treatment effect heterogeneity. We find that the average effect of remote learning is negative (-0.14σfor reading; -0.17σfor math). Notably, we also find evidence of positive learning effects for children whose parents have the strongest demand for remote learning. Our results suggest that an important subset of students currently sorting into post-pandemic remote learning benefit from expanded choice.
Social Interactions, Information, and Preferences for Schools: Experimental Evidence from Los Angeles

Campos, Christopher

Submitted

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This paper studies how parents’ school choices are affected by information about school and peer quality and how social interactions mediate changes in demand. I design an information intervention that cross-randomizes whether parents receive information about school quality (school value-added) and peer quality. Using a spillover design that varies the saturation of information across schools, I also randomize parents’ proximity to other parents with similar information. I find that the information leads to changes in parental preferences toward higher value-added schools, and this occurs when both parents and their neighbors receive information. These results imply substantial information spillovers. I complement this evidence with survey data on the distribution of beliefs over school and peer quality and conclude that the direct and spillover effects of my experiment come primarily from changes in parental preferences rather than an updating of parental beliefs in response to information. These findings show that when parents are informed about school and peer quality, their social interactions lead to changes in preferences in a way that rewards more effective schools. Enrollment in more effective schools led to improved socio-emotional outcomes not captured by standardized exams. This evidence suggests that the intervention did more than alter educational pathways; it also played a critical role in shaping important developmental aspects of students’ lives.
The Impact of Public School Choice: Evidence from Los Angeles’ Zones of Choice

Campos, Christopher, and Kearns, Caitlin

Quarterly Journal of Economics 139(2), 2024

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Does a school district that expands school choice provide better outcomes for students than a neighborhood-based assignment system? This paper studies the Zones of Choice (ZOC) program, a school choice initiative of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) that created small high school markets in some neighborhoods but left attendance-zone boundaries in place throughout the rest of the district. We study market-level impacts of choice on student achievement and college enrollment using a differences-in-differences design. Student outcomes in ZOC markets increased markedly, narrowing achievement and college enrollment gaps between ZOC neighborhoods and the rest of the district. The effects of ZOC are larger for schools exposed to more competition, supporting the notion that competition is a key channel. Demand estimates suggest families place substantial weight on schools’ academic quality, providing schools with competition-induced incentives to improve their effectiveness. The evidence demonstrates that public school choice programs have the potential to improve school quality and reduce neighborhood-based disparities in educational opportunity.