经济与金融系学术讨论会第9期 

时间：2018年1月12日（周五）12：00-13：00

地点：同济大厦A楼508室

题目： Priority Rules in School Assignment

主讲人：Pieter Gautier (Professor, VU University Amsterdam,蔡晓鸣老师的导师)

语言：英语 

报告人简介：

Pieter Gautier has been Professor of Macroeconomics of the labour market at the Economics department of VU Amsterdam since 2008. Before he has held positions at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. He has been visiting scholar/professor at Georgetown. MIT, Toulouse and Sciences Po (Paris). The research interests of Gautier range from sorting in the marriage and labour market to competing mechanisms. His work has been published in top journals in economics (American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of the European Economic Association, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Economic Theory). 

Abstract:

The Student-proposing Deferred Acceptance Mechanism (DA) does not respond to students’ cardinal preferences, which entails inefficiencies. However, DA complemented with priority rules that are correlated with the intensity of student preferences may overcome these inefficiencies. To study the effect of priority rules in school assignment on student welfare, we combine administrative and survey data on school choice and student preferences from the school district of Utrecht. We compare student welfare under different school assignment mechanisms: DA with random tie-breaking, DA with priority rules, and choice-augmented DA. In the choice-augmented DA mechanism, students submit a rank-ordered list of schools and name a target school where they have priority (Abdulkadiroglu et al., 2015). We consider three priority rules: distance priority, sibling priority, and priority of high-achieving students in academically oriented high-schools. First, we show that these priorities are correlated with students’ ordinal and cardinal preferences. Second, by comparing counterfactual allocations, we find that choice-augmented DA results in a minor welfare improvement relative to DA. DA complemented with distance-to-school-based priority yields the highest student welfare. Survey-based and estimated measures of cardinal utility are highly correlated and rank the different school assignment mechanisms similarly.