EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Admission to Selective Schools, Alphabetically

Stepan Jurajda and Daniel Münich

CERGE-EI Working Papers from The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague

Abstract: One’s position in an alphabetically sorted list may be important in determining access to rationed goods or oversubscribed public services. Motivated by anecdotal evidence, we investigate the importance of the position in the alphabet of the last name initial of Czech students for their admission chances into oversubscribed schools. Empirical evidence based on the population of students applying to universities in 1999 suggests that, among marginal applicants, moving from the top to the bottom of the alphabet decreases admission chances by over 2 percent. The implication of such admission procedures for student ability sorting across differently oversubscribed schools is then confirmed by evidence based on a national survey of secondary students’ test scores.

JEL-codes: H4 I21 J71 J78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cerge-ei.cz/pdf/wp/Wp282.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Admission to selective schools, alphabetically (2010) Downloads
Working Paper: Admission to Selective Schools, Alphabetically (2006) 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:cer:papers:wp282

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CERGE-EI Working Papers from The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucie Vasiljevova ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-30
Handle: RePEc:cer:papers:wp282