School choice aims to improve (1) the matching between children and schools and (2) students’ educational outcomes. Yet, the concern is that disadvantaged families are less able to exercise choice, which raises (3) equity concerns. The Boston mechanism (BM) is a procedure that is widely used...

This paper uses data consisting of students' strategically reported preferences and their underlying true preferences to study the course allocation mechanism used at Harvard Business School. We show that the mechanism is manipulable in theory, manipulated in practice, and that these...

We study in the laboratory, a variant of the house allocation with existing tenants problem where agents are partitioned into tiers with different privileges. Members of higher tiers receive their allocation before those in lower tiers and can also take the endowment of a member of a lower tier...

The 1993 Survey of Household Income and Wealth, a large cross-section of the Italian population covering 24,000 individuals, reports detailed information on children’s attendance of public and private schools and parents’ assessments of the quality of public schools in the city of residence....

A large school consolidation reform in the Netherlands changed minimum school size rules underlying public funding. The supply of schools decreased by 15 percent, but this varied considerably across municipalities. We find that reducing the number of schools by 10 percent increases pupils'...

In this paper we examine the long term effects of socialization and segregation in schools, on labour market outcomes. We incorporate a model of “informational” peer influence by which beliefs of pupils are affected by exposure to other pupils’ posterior beliefs. Specifically, we focus on...

This paper makes the following point: “detracking” schools, that is preventing them from allocating students to classes according to their ability, may lead to an increase in income residential segregation. It does so in a simple model where households care about the school peer group of...

We survey the literature analysing the price formation and trading process, and the consequences of market organization for price discovery and welfare. We develop a united perspective on theoretical, empirical and experimental approaches. We discuss the evidence on transaction costs and the...

Motivated by the regulatory debate in electricity markets, we seek to understand how market design affects market performance through its impact on investment incentives. For this purpose, we study a two-stage game in which firms choose their capacities under demand uncertainty prior to bidding...

We analyze political selection in a closed list proportional system where parties have strong gate-keeping power, which they use as an instrument to pursue votes. Parties face a trade-off between selecting loyal candidates or experts, who are highly valued by the voters and thus increase the...