The Illusion of School Choice: Empirical Evidence from Barcelona

Maia Güell and Caterina Calsamiglia

No 810, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

Abstract: The Boston mechanism is a school allocation procedure that is widely used around the world. To resolve overdemands, priority is often given to families who live in the neighborhood school. We note that such priorities define some schools as being safer. We exploit an unexpected change in the definition of neighborhood in Barcelona to show that when allowing school choice under the BM with priorities: (1) the resulting allocation is not very different from a neighborhood-based assignment, and (2) important inequalities emerge beyond parents' naivete found in the literature.

Keywords: school choice; Boston mechanism; priorities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 D63 I24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-gth and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (31)

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Related works:
Working Paper: The Illusion of School Choice: Empirical Evidence from Barcelona (2014)
Working Paper: The Illusion of School Choice: Empirical Evidence from Barcelona (2014)
Working Paper: The Illusion of School Choice: Empirical Evidence from Barcelona (2014)
Working Paper: The Illusion of School Choice: Empirical Evidence from Barcelona (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bge:wpaper:810

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