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.
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Email: Christopher.Campos@chicagobooth.edu.
Selected Research
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College Major Choice, Payoffs, and Gender GapsUnder ReviewThis paper studies how college major choices shape earnings and fertility outcomes. Using administrative data that link students’ preferences, quasi-random assignment to majors, and post-college outcomes, we estimate the causal pecuniary and non-pecuniary returns to different fields of study. We document substantial heterogeneity in these returns across majors and show that such variation helps explain gender gaps in labor market outcomes: women place greater weight on balancing career and family in their major choices, and these preference differences account for about 30% of the gender earnings gap among college graduates. Last, we use our causal estimates to evaluate the effects of counterfactual assignment rules that target representation gaps in settings with centralized assignment systems. We find that gender quotas in high-return fields can significantly reduce representation and earnings gaps with minimal impacts on efficiency and aggregate fertility.
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Social Interactions, Information, and Preferences for Schools: Experimental Evidence from Los AngelesUnder ReviewThis paper measures parents’ beliefs about school and peer quality, how information about school and peer quality affects parents’ school choices, and how social interactions mediate these effects. In a field experiment, parents were randomly given information on school quality and peer quality, with varying proximity to other parents who received similar information. Results show that parents typically underestimate school quality and overestimate peer quality. When both parents and their neighbors received information, preferences shifted toward higher value-added schools. These findings suggest substantial information spillovers, leading to increased enrollment in effective schools. Enrollment in more effective schools leads 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.
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Who Benefits from Remote Schooling? Self-selection and Match EffectsUnder ReviewWe study the distributional effects of remote learning using a novel approach that combines preference data from a conjoint survey experiment with administrative student records. The experimentally derived preference data allow us to account for selection into remote learning while also studying selection patterns and treatment effect heterogeneity. We validate the approach using random variation from school choice lotteries. Our analysis of the average impacts of remote learning finds negative effects on reading (-0.13 SD) and math (-0.14 SD) achievement. Notably, we find evidence of positive learning effects for children whose parents have the strongest demand for remote learning. Parental concerns related to bullying appear to be an important driver of the demand for remote learning. Moreover, we find that across-the-board positive impacts of remote learning on bullying outcomes operate as a compensating differential for negative impacts on learning. Our results suggest that an important subset of students who currently sort into post-pandemic remote learning benefit from expanded choice.
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The Impact of Public School Choice: Evidence from Los Angeles’ Zones of ChoiceQuarterly Journal of Economics 139(2), 2024Does 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.
