IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/bge/wpaper/949.html

Sorting in public school districts under the Boston Mechanism

Author

Listed:
  • Caterina Calsamiglia
  • Francisco Martinez-Mora
  • Antonio Miralles

Abstract

We study the extent to which the widely used Boston Mecha- nism (BM) fosters ability and socioeconomic segregation across public schools. Our model encompasses an endogenous component of school quality -determined by the peer group- and an exogenous one, so that there is at least one bad school ex-ante. Even with no residential priorities, BM generates ability sorting between a priori equally good public schools: an elitist public school emerges. A richer model with some preference for closer schools and flexible residential choice does not eliminate this effect. It rather worsens the peer quality of the nonelitist good school. The existence of private schools makes the best public school more elitist, while the bad school loses peer quality. Their presence may also engender socioeconomic segregation. The main alternative assignment mechanism, Deferred Acceptance, is resilient to such sorting effects.

Suggested Citation

  • Caterina Calsamiglia & Francisco Martinez-Mora & Antonio Miralles, 2017. "Sorting in public school districts under the Boston Mechanism," Working Papers 949, Barcelona School of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:bge:wpaper:949
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://bw.bse.esgallapre3.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/949-file.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Gortázar, Lucas & Mayor, David & Montalbán, José, 2020. "School Choice Priorities and School Segregation: Evidence from Madrid," Working Paper Series 1/2020, Stockholm University, Swedish Institute for Social Research, revised 20 May 2020.
    2. Christian Basteck & Marco Mantovani, 2023. "Aiding applicants: leveling the playing field within the immediate acceptance mechanism," Review of Economic Design, Springer;Society for Economic Design, vol. 27(1), pages 187-220, February.
    3. Caterina Calsamiglia & Francisco Martinez-Mora & Antonio Miralles, 2020. "Cardinal Assignment Mechanisms: Money Matters More than it Should," Working Papers 1150, Barcelona School of Economics.
    4. Estelle Cantillon, 2017. "Broadening the market design approach to school choice," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 33(4), pages 613-634.
    5. van der Klaauw, Bas & Oosterbeek, Hessel & Sóvágó, Sándor, 2019. "Why are schools segregated? Evidence from the secondary-school match in Amsterdam," CEPR Discussion Papers 13462, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    6. Akbarpour, Mohammad & Kapor, Adam & Neilson, Christopher & van Dijk, Winnie & Zimmerman, Seth, 2022. "Centralized School choice with unequal outside options," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 210(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education
    • H4 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods
    • D78 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Positive Analysis of Policy Formulation and Implementation

    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:bge:wpaper:949. 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: Bruno Guallar (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/bargses.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.