School choice is one of the most researched topics in the educational sciences in the last decades. Its importance in reorganizing educational systems in many countries is unquestionable. Current literature underline that its impact should be positive under certain policy framework: this is...

School choice aims to improve (1) the matching between children and schools and (2) students’ educa-tional 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...

We investigate the determinants of students’ university choice, with a focus on expected monetary returns, non-pecuniary factors enjoyed at school, and financial constraints, in the Pakistani context. To mitigate the identification problem concerning the separation of preferences,...

Abdulkadiroglu et al. (2011) show that some naive participants may be better off under the Boston mechanism than under deferred acceptance. Here we show that under the veil of ignorance all naive students may prefer the Boston mechanism.

I study the self-selection of motivated teachers between public and private schools in a mixed duopoly environment. The quality is influenced by the effort exerted by the teachers. Teachers' motivation may have a positive impact on the levels of effort and, then, on the quality. The effect of...

We introduce a two-sided, many-to-one matching with contracts model in which agents with unit demand match to branches that may have multiple slots available to accept contracts. Each slot has its own linear priority order over contracts; a branch chooses contracts by filling its slots...

The Boston mechanism is criticized for its poor incentive and welfare performance compared with the Gale-Shapley deferred-acceptance mechanism (DA). Using school choice data from Beijing, I investigate parents' behavior under the Boston mechanism, taking into account parents' possible mistakes...

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...

The expansion of state-mandated tests in the 1990s and the testing requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act have supplied researchers with an abundance of data on test scores that can be used as measures of school quality. This paper uses the state-mandated test scores for 5th grade and 11th...