This paper measures parents' beliefs about school and peer quality, how information about each affects school choices and student outcomes, and how social interactions mediate these effects. Parents underestimate school quality and overestimate peer quality. Crossrandomized school and peer...

Public school choice has evolved rapidly in the past two decades, as districts roll out new magnet, dual-language, and themed programs to broaden educational opportunity. We use newly collected national data to document that opt-in (voluntary) systems: (i) are the modal design; (ii) are harder...

We study the distributional effects of remote learning using a novel approach combining preference data from a conjoint survey with administrative records. Experimentally derived preferences account for selection into remote learning and treatment effect heterogeneity. We validate the approach...

The Deferred Acceptance (DA) algorithm is stable and strategy-proof, but can produce matchings that are Pareto-inefficient for students, and thus several alternatives have been proposed to correct this inefficiency that only involve consented priority violations. However, we show that these...

We conduct the first laboratory school choice experiment in which parents - the relevant decision makers in the field - are the experimental subjects. We compare Deferred Acceptance (DA) with two manipulable but potentially more efficient alternatives: Efficiency-Adjusted Deferred Acceptance...

This paper studies the relative importance of teacher-student match effects and general teacher effectiveness in producing student learning, and quantifies gains from alternative teacher assignments. We estimate a framework that separates these components, allowing match quality to vary with...

Preferences are central to matching markets, yet experiments typically rely on induced preferences that may not reflect real-world decision-making. We examine how induced versus non-induced preferences shape behavior in matching experiments, extending Chen and Sönmez (2006). Using the most...

This paper examines how translating school assignment information into parents' native languages affects school choice outcomes in Bremen, a city state in Germany, where a strategyincentivizing immediate acceptance mechanism is used. While translated information was made available to...

Close to 20% of secondary school students in Amsterdam - and elsewhere - transfer between secondary schools at some point, even when initially placed in their most-preferred school. School switching is costly for the students involved and disrupts the learning environment of their former and new...

The optimal functioning of centralized allocation systems is undermined by the presence of institutions operating off-platform - a feature common to virtually all real-world implementations. These off-platform options generate justified envy, as students may reject their centralized assignment...

Over sixty years following Brown vs. Board of Education, racial and socioeconomic segregation and lack of equal access to educational opportunities persist. Across the country, voluntary desegregation busing programs aim to ameliorate these imbalances and disparities. A longstanding...

The Deferred Acceptance (DA) mechanism can generate inefficient placements. Although Pareto-dominant mechanisms exist, it remains unclear which and how many students could improve their DA assignment. We characterize the set of unimprovable students and show that it includes those unassigned or...

Educational tracking-separating students into tracks or schools by ability-is commonplace, but access and preferences for top programs often depend on socioeconomic status (SES), reinforcing inequality. We study shadow education in the context of an early-tracking system, exploiting score...

This study examines the consequences of college students pursuing degree programs that do not align with the tracks and strands they selected in senior high school. We utilize a unique dataset that links admissions and enrollment records from the University of the Philippines Diliman to...

This article explores the impact of procedural information on the behavior of students under two school admission procedures commonly used in the US, the EU, and other jurisdictions: the Gale-Shapley mechanism and the Boston mechanism. In a lab experiment, I compare the impact of information...

The Deferred Acceptance algorithm (DA) frequently produces Pareto inefficient allocations in school choice problems. While a number of efficient mechanisms that Pareto-dominate DA are available, a normative question remains unexplored: which students should benefit from efficiency enhancements?...

Choosing a school is one of the most important decisions parents make with regards to their children's human capital, yet they often face restricted choice sets. We study parental preferences over peer quality and school effectiveness in the centralized education market of Barbados, where...

The optimal functioning of centralized allocation systems is undermined by the presence of institutions operating off-platform-a feature common to virtually all real-world implementations. These off-platform options generate justified envy, as students may reject their centralized assignment in...

This study examines how centralized-admission school lotteries affect between-school racial and ethnic segregation in the largest U.S. public school districts. Using original nationwide panel data and a difference-in-differences design with staggered adoption, the research analyzes effects on...

How do beliefs on admission probability influence application choices? In this study, we empirically investigate whether and how admission probability is reflected in application choices in a centralized admission system. We exploit a novel setting of a dynamic deferred acceptance mechanism as...

Public school choice has evolved rapidly in the past two decades, as districts roll out new magnet, dual-language, and themed programs to broaden educational opportunity. We use newly collected national data to document that opt-in (voluntary) systems: (i) are the modal design; (ii) are harder...

Contrary to classical theory, we provide experimental evidence that preference reports in a strategy-proof school-choice mechanism systematically depend on beliefs. We employ a "hard-easy gap" to exogenously vary students' beliefs about their priority rank. As predicted, underconfidence induces...

School assignment policies are a key lever to increase access to high performing schools and to promote racial and socioeconomic integration. For over 50 years, the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO) has bussed students of color from Boston, Massachusetts to relatively...

Pop-Eleches and Urquiola (2013) apply a regression discontinuity to the Romanian secondary school system, and notably find that (a) students who go to a better school get higher scores on an exam used for university admission, (b) parents of students who get into a better school help their kids...

We partner with Ecuador's government to implement a centralized school choice system using a Deferred Acceptance algorithm in Manta. Our study evaluates the welfare impact of transitioning from a distance-based assignment system to one that incorporates families' preferences. Results show that...

Though the use of tracking policies to stratify students is commonplace, evi- dence concerning the effects of ability-based tracking on student performance is mixed. Using rich data from the Hungarian secondary school centralized assignment mechanism and a quasi-experimental framework, we find...