An Improved Method for Estimating School-Level Characteristics from Census Data

We propose a new method for estimating school-level characteristics from publicly available census data. We use a school’s location to impute its catchment area by aggregating the nearest n census block groups such that the number of school-aged children in those n block groups is just over the number of students enrolled in that school. We then weight census data by the number of school-aged children in the block-group to estimate school-level measures. We conduct several robustness checks to assess the quality of our estimates and find that our method is broadly successful in replicating known school-level characteristics and producing unbiased estimates for school-level income. This method expands the available set of school-level variables to the broader and richer set of characteristics measured in the census, which can then be used to conduct descriptive and observational research across a long time horizon.