Distorted quality signals in school markets

José Ignacio Cuesta, Felipe González and Cristian Larroulet Philippi

Journal of Development Economics, 2020, vol. 147, issue C

Abstract: Information plays a key role in markets with consumer choice. In education, data on schools is often gathered through standardized testing. However, the use of these tests has been controversial because of distortions in the metric itself. We study the Chilean educational market and document that low-performing students are underrepresented in test days, generating distortions in school quality information. These distorted quality signals affect parents' school choice and induce misallocation of public programs. These results provide novel evidence for the costs that distortions in quality signals generated by standardized tests in accountability systems impose on educational markets.

Keywords: Accountability; Schools; Quality; Disclosure; Choice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 L15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387820301073
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Distorted Quality Signals in School Markets (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:deveco:v:147:y:2020:i:c:s0304387820301073

DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2020.102532

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Development Economics is currently edited by M. R. Rosenzweig

More articles in Journal of Development Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().