IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/27887.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

When Information is Not Enough: Evidence from a Centralized School Choice System

Author

Listed:
  • Kehinde F. Ajayi
  • Willa H. Friedman
  • Adrienne M. Lucas

Abstract

Students often make school choice decisions with inadequate information. We present results from delivering information to randomly selected students (and some randomly selected parents) across 900 junior high schools in Ghana, a country with universal secondary school choice. We provided guidance on application strategies and reported the selectivity and exit exam performance of secondary schools, information students and parents prioritized. We find that despite information changing the characteristics of schools to which students applied and students gaining admission to higher value-added schools, they were not more likely to matriculate on time or at all. Information was not the only constraint.

Suggested Citation

  • Kehinde F. Ajayi & Willa H. Friedman & Adrienne M. Lucas, 2020. "When Information is Not Enough: Evidence from a Centralized School Choice System," NBER Working Papers 27887, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:27887
    Note: CH DEV ED PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w27887.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Emil Chrisander & Andreas Bjerre-Nielsen, 2023. "Why Do Students Lie and Should We Worry? An Analysis of Non-truthful Reporting," Papers 2302.13718, arXiv.org, revised Mar 2023.
    2. Hakimov, Rustamdjan & Kübler, Dorothea & Pan, Siqi, 2021. "Costly Information Acquisition in Centralized Matching Markets," Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series 280, CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition.
    3. Derek Neal & Joseph Root, 2024. "The Provision of Information and Incentives in School Assignment Mechanisms," NBER Chapters, in: New Directions in Market Design, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Kutscher, Macarena & Nath, Shanjukta & Urzúa, Sergio, 2023. "Centralized admission systems and school segregation: Evidence from a national reform," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 221(C).
    5. Elacqua, Gregory & Kutscher, Macarena, 2023. "Navigating Centralized Admissions: The Role of Parental Preferences in School Segregation in Chile," IDB Publications (Working Papers) 13340, Inter-American Development Bank.
    6. Sarah Cohodes & Sean P. Corcoran & Jennifer Jennings & Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj, 2022. "When Do Informational Interventions Work? Experimental Evidence from New York City High School Choice," Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute Working Papers 057, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
    7. Esther Duflo & Pascaline Dupas & Michael Kremer, 2021. "The Impact of Free Secondary Education: Experimental Evidence from Ghana," NBER Working Papers 28937, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D84 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Expectations; Speculations
    • I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education
    • I24 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Education and Inequality
    • I25 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Education and Economic Development
    • O15 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Economic Development: Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; Migration

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:27887. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.