A central argument for school choice is that families value the freedom to exercise choice and can make wise decisions. This principle may underlie why lottery-based school evaluations, which exploit over-subscription due to excess demand, have almost always reported positive or zero achievement...

We examine whether changes in the local school choice environment affect the amount of information parents collect about local school quality, using data on over 100 million searches from greatschools.org. We link monthly data on search frequency in local “Search Units” to information on...

Coordinated single-offer school assignment systems are a popular education reform. We show that uncoordinated offers in NYC's school assignment mechanism generated mismatches. One-third of applicants were unassigned after the main round and later administratively placed at less desirable...

We consider the classic problem of estimating group treatment effects when individuals sort based on observed and unobserved characteristics that affect the outcome. Using a standard choice model, we show that controlling for group averages of observed individual characteristics potentially...

This paper examines non-price competition among colleges to attract highly qualified students, exploiting the South Korean setting where the national government sets rules governing applications. We identify some basic facts about the behavior of colleges before and after a 1994 policy change...

Several school districts use assignment systems that give students an incentive to misrepresent their preferences. We find evidence consistent with strategic behavior in Cambridge. Such strategizing can complicate preference analysis. This paper develops empirical methods for studying random...

This paper studies the determinants of mismatch in educational attainment. Mismatch arises when high ability individuals do not obtain a college degree and/or low ability individuals do. Using data from the NLSY97 survey, the paper estimates a structural model of education choice that matches...

This paper analyzes the properties of the Taiwan mechanism, used for high school placement nationwide starting in 2014. In the Taiwan mechanism, points are deducted from an applicant's score with larger penalties for lower ranked choices. Deduction makes the mechanism a new hybrid between the...

We model household choice of schools under the Boston mechanism (BM) and develop a new method, applicable to a broad class of mechanisms, to fully solve the choice problem even if it is infeasible via the traditional method. We estimate the joint distribution of household preferences and...

To explore whether schools' causal impacts on test-scores measure their overall impact on students, we exploit quasi-random school assignments and data from Trinidad and Tobago to estimate the causal impacts of individual schools on several outcomes. Schools' impacts on high-stakes tests are...