The pandemic exodus: What drives private-to-public school migration in Peru

In 2020, the Peruvian Ministry of Education responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and an unprecedented rise in demand for public schools by implementing a centralized assignment mechanism that allowed thousands of students at various levels of education to move from the private to the public sector. In this study, we explore empirically the determinants of both accepting a place and remaining in the assigned public school. Exploiting the randomness in assignment created by oversubscribed schools within the deferred acceptance algorithm, we causally estimate the role of distance in the decision to accept the assignment and explore its impact on the decision to remain. We also shed light on the determinants influencing parental preferences. Our results show that families care about distance to the assigned public school, as well as academic and peer quality with respect to their school of origin. Parents weigh distance to school, academic performance, and peer demographics differently based on their familiarity with these characteristics. Consequently, experiencing a given school environment can alter the significance of specific attributes when later deciding whether to stay in the assigned school. While school quality (measured by math scores) is more influential at the acceptance stage, distance and peer demographics become more important in the decision to remain. Our findings offer valuable insights into how governments can strengthen the supply of public schooling.