Perceived Ability and School Choices:Experimental Evidence and Scale-up Effect

• Department of Economics

In this seminar, Matteo Bobba (Toulouse School of Economics) will present the paper "Perceived Ability and School Choices:Experimental Evidence and Scale-up Effect."

This paper explores an information intervention designed and implemented within a

school assignment mechanism in Mexico City. Through a randomized experiment, we

show that providing a subset of applicants with feedback about their academic perfor-

mance can enhance sorting by skill across high school tracks. This reallocation effect

results in higher completion rates three years post-assignment. We further integrate the

experimental evaluation into an empirical model of school choice and educational out-

comes to assess the impact of the intervention for the overall population of applicants.

Information provision is shown to increase the ex-ante efficiency of the student-school

allocation, while congestion externalities are detrimental for the equity of education

outcomes