EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Affirmative action and the choice of schools

Ursula Mello

Journal of Public Economics, 2023, vol. 219, issue C

Abstract: Socioeconomic-based affirmative action in higher education has gained importance following controversies over race-based alternatives. In many settings, these interventions use a school-based criterion that selects beneficiaries relative to their peers. Exploiting a nationwide quota policy in Brazil that reserved a large share of vacancies in higher education for public-school students, I show that the reform increases movements from private to public schools by 31% and that movers come disproportionately from low-SES and low-quality private schools. An exploration of the mechanisms shows that movers increase their future probability of higher education attendance at the expense of attending poorer and lower-performing public schools. The reform also leads to changes in school choice of indirectly exposed cohorts and general-equilibrium effects in the form of school closure.

Keywords: Affirmative action; School choice; Behavioral responses (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 H31 I24 I25 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272723000063
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Affirmative Action and the Choice of Schools (2021) Downloads
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:pubeco:v:219:y:2023:i:c:s0047272723000063

DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2023.104824

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Public Economics is currently edited by R. Boadway and J. Poterba

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

 
Page updated 2025-03-23
Handle: RePEc:eee:pubeco:v:219:y:2023:i:c:s0047272723000063