Unlocking Legal Efficiency Gains in School Switch Programs

Tommy Andersson (), Nils Lager () and Dany Kessel ()
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Tommy Andersson: Department of Economics, Lund University, Postal: School of Economics and Management, Box 7080, S-220 07 Lund, Sweden
Nils Lager: Stockholm School of Economics
Dany Kessel: Svenskt Utbildningsteknologi AB

No 2026:4, Working Papers from Lund University, Department of Economics

Abstract: We study school switches in which students who have already been assigned seats request reassignment. Unlike in regular school choice, stability need not be legally binding in such programs, since students’ priority-based claims have already been satisfied upstream. Efficiency then naturally becomes the primary design objective. To quantify the potential legal efficiency gains, we compare Deferred Acceptance (DA) with Top Trading Cycles (TTC) and an efficiency-adjusted DA (EADAM) using Swedish data. TTC and EADAM triple switching rates compared to DA. This difference is driven by the absence of slack in effective capacity and shrinks rapidly when introducing additional seats.

Keywords: School switch; Efficiency; Stability; Matching algorithms; Capacity slack (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 D47 D78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 9 pages
Date: 2026-05-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:lunewp:2026_004

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