Sorting in public school districts under the Boston Mechanism

Caterina Calsamiglia, Francisco Martínez-Mora and Antonio Miralles

No 949, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

Abstract: We study the extent to which the widely used Boston Mecha- nism (BM) fosters ability and socioeconomic segregation across public schools. Our model encompasses an endogenous component of school quality -determined by the peer group- and an exogenous one, so that there is at least one bad school ex-ante. Even with no residential priorities, BM generates ability sorting between a priori equally good public schools: an elitist public school emerges. A richer model with some preference for closer schools and flexible residential choice does not eliminate this effect. It rather worsens the peer quality of the nonelitist good school. The existence of private schools makes the best public school more elitist, while the bad school loses peer quality. Their presence may also engender socioeconomic segregation. The main alternative assignment mechanism, Deferred Acceptance, is resilient to such sorting effects.

Keywords: school choice; Mechanism Design; peer effects; local public goods. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D78 H4 I21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.barcelonagse.eu/sites/default/files/working_paper_pdfs/949.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Sorting in public school districts under the Boston Mechanism (2017)
Working Paper: Sorting in public school districts under the Boston Mechanism (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:bge:wpaper:949

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bruno Guallar ().