Inferring School Quality from Rankings: The Impact of School Choice

Claudia Herresthal

No 747, Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics

Abstract: School choice reforms allow families to apply to non-local schools and assign additional funding to schools based on families' demand. For these reforms to promote high-quality schools, families need to infer school quality from past performance, but past performance also depends on student ability. Because reforms alter the allocation of students to schools, it is unclear whether performance becomes more or less informative about quality. I model families as trading off estimated quality against proximity, and analyze a steady-state Bayesian-Nash equilibrium. I show that performance-based rankings become more informative about quality only if oversubscribed schools can choose whom to accept.

Keywords: rankings; performance; school quality; school choice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D80 I20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-06-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
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