Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Many school districts in the U.S. offer students a choice of schools, with seats at highly demanded schools apportioned via a centralized mechanism with random rationing. This paper presents an empirical analysis of a school choice mechanism that rewards accurate beliefs and careful strategizing on the part of parents. We conduct a household survey of parents in New Haven, Connecticut, to collect data on households' information acquisition, preferences, strategic sophistication, and subjective beliefs about admissions chances. We link this survey to administrative data on applications, outcomes, test scores and enrollment records and use this data to inform an empirical model of school choice that explicitly models families' preferences, beliefs, and sophistication. We use the estimated model to evaluate the individual and general equilibrium effects on the distribution of test scores and graduation rates of improving households' information about the lottery mechanism, and of switching to the strategy-proof student-proposing deferred acceptance algorithm.