The central vs. local nature of high-school exit exam systems can have important repercussions on the labor market. By increasing the informational content of grades, central exams may improve the sorting of students by productivity. To test this, we exploit the unique German setting where...

This paper examines the effects of Asian segregation on students' academic performance in New York City primary schools. We use exogenous variation in the share of Asian students across cohorts and schools stemming from a fertility shock among Asian population in the Chinese year of the Dragon....

This paper analyzes whether information on high school quality published by a national newspaper affects school choice in the Netherlands. For this purpose, we use both school level and individual student level data. First, we study the causal effect of quality scores on the influx of new high...

This paper evaluates the effects of a major Swedish school choice reform. The reform in 1992 increased school choice and competition among public schools as well as through a large-scale introduction of private schools. We estimate the effects of school choice and competition, using precise...

Choice and competition in education have found growing support from both policy makers and academics in the recent past. Yet, evidence on the actual benefits of market-oriented reforms is at best mixed. Moreover, while the economic rationale for choice and competition is clear, in existing work...

Using several data sources from Chile, we study the impact of school choice at the time of starting primary school. To study the contribution of school choice, we exploit the combination of multiple cutoffs defining the minimum age at entry, and the difference across municipalities in the...

Understanding parental response to non-test score attributes is crucial to design effective school choice systems. We study an intervention providing parents with hard-to-find information on the school environment while holding information on school performance constant. The provision of this...