UC Berkeley

This dissertation empirically explores different aspects of the market design in centralized school choice.The first chapter studies the consequences of limited information among school choice participants, and the influence of outside options in application and enrollment decisions. 23% of the Chilean applicants who receive an offer choose to enroll elsewhere, unnecessarily blocking seats that would improve the allocation for 12% of the placed applicants and offer placement to 11% of the non-placed students. Based on a model of the joint decision of school choice and enrollment, I show that imperfect information translates into penalization on the valuation of the schools, affecting application and search behavior and decreasing the probability of enrollment. Concurrently, greater availability of outside options diminishes the incentive for search and lowers the cost of rejecting placement offers. The counterfactual analysis highlights the effect of different information campaigns and the inclusion of outside options in the centralized system, underscoring the importance of after-market design in centralized school choice systems. The second chapter shows that beliefs about admissions chances shape choice outcomes even when the school choice assignment mechanism is strategyproof. Data from a large-scale survey of choice participants in Chile shows that learning about schools is hard, that beliefs about admissions chances guide the decision to stop searching, and that applicants systematically underestimate non-placement risk. We then use RCT and RD research designs to evaluate scaled live feedback policies. 22% of applicants submitting applications where risks of non-placement are high respond to warnings by adding schools to their lists, reducing non-placement risk by 58%. The third chapter evaluates how new information influences families' applications and assignment outcomes in elementary school choice settings. Specifically, using a multi-country RCT based in Tacna, Peru and Manta, Ecuador, we examine the effect of providing personalized information on schooling alternatives and placement risk. We find that applicants who received feedback on placement risk and a suggestion of new schools added more schools to their applications and were more likely to include recommended schools than other alternatives.