School choice plans in many cities grant students higher priority for some (but not all) seats at their neighborhood schools. This paper demonstrates how the precedence order, i.e. the order in which different types of seats are filled by applicants, has quantitative effects on distributional...

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...

The literature suggests that competition among schools might increase quality. However, not much empirical evidence is present as only a few countries allow competition at a large scale. One exception is the Netherlands. Free parental choice is the leading principle of the Dutch education system...

The distribution of Roma and non-Roma students across schools has become considerably more unequal in Hungary since the 1980's. This paper analyzes the effect of school choice and local educational policies on that inequality, known as school segregation, in 100 Hungarian towns. We combine...

By the 2008/09 school year the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany) abolished binding school catchment areas (SCAs) in all municipalities. The reform has been controversial and it was feared that school choice would increase ethnic segregation. Using data on all primary schools, we...