Peer Preferences, School Competition, and the Effects of Public School Choice

Levon Barseghyan, Damon Clark and Stephen Coate

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2019, vol. 11, issue 4, 124-58

Abstract: This paper develops a new economic model of public school choice. The key innovation is to model competition between schools in an environment in which parents have peer preferences. The analysis yields three main findings. First, peer preferences dampen schools' incentives to exert effort in response to competitive pressure. Second, when peer preferences are sufficiently strong, choice can reduce social welfare. This is because choice is costly to exercise but aggregate peer quality is fixed. Third, given strong peer preferences, choice can reduce school quality in more affluent neighborhoods. We conclude that peer preferences weaken the case for choice.

JEL-codes: H73 H75 I21 I28 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
Note: DOI: 10.1257/pol.20170484
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/pol.20170484 (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/pol.20170484.appx (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/pol.20170484.ds (application/zip)
Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.

Related works:
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:aea:aejpol:v:11:y:2019:i:4:p:124-58

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/subscriptions

Access Statistics for this article

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy is currently edited by Matthew Shapiro

More articles in American Economic Journal: Economic Policy from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().