Working Papers

Distributional Impacts of Centralized School Choice, with Jaewon Lee

Abstract: Informational frictions in centralized school choice can significantly influence its distributional consequences. Recognition of such frictions is also necessary to accurately measure welfare. We build a model of school applications, allowing applicants to consider only a limited set of schools and to have mistaken beliefs about their admission chances. Quasi-experimental variation and rich information in students’ rank-ordered lists enable identification. Utilizing this model, we evaluate the impacts of centralized school choice in New York City on racial segregation and equity in welfare, decomposing the contributions of the frictions and the preferences of students and schools. We also quantify matching stability and deviations from truthful reporting. Our results show that while school choice improves welfare across races, limited consideration substantially compromises these gains, particularly for Black and Hispanic students. A counterfactual policy involving personalized school recommendations designed using our model is projected to recover 20–36% of the welfare losses.

Pre-doctoral Publication

(In Korean) Parental Wealth, Children’s Ability and Entering Prestigious Colleges, with Se-Jik Kim and Keunkwan Ryu, Korean Economic Journal 54.2 (2015): 356-383. [paper]