A new centralized mechanism was introduced in New York City and Boston to assign students to public schools in district school-choice programs. This mechanism was advocated for its superior fairness property, besides others, over the mechanisms it replaced. In this paper, we introduce a new...

This paper investigates the welfare effects of affirmative action policies in school choice. We show that affirmative action policies can have perverse consequences. Specifically, we demonstrate that there are market situations in which affirmative action policies inevitably hurt every minority...

We study the effect of different school choice mechanisms on schools' incentives for quality improvement. To do so, we introduce the following criterion: A mechanism respects improvements of school quality if each school becomes weakly better off whenever that school becomes more preferred by...