TY  - JOUR
AU  - Hastings,Justine S.
AU  - Kane,Thomas J.
AU  - Staiger,Douglas O.
TI  - Parental Preferences and School Competition: Evidence from a Public School Choice Program
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 11805
PY  - 2005
Y2  - November 2005
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11805
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11805.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Justine S. Hastings
Brown University
Department of Economics
64 Waterman Street
Providence, RI 02912
Tel: 203/432-3714
Fax: 203/432-6323
E-Mail: justine_hastings@brown.edu

Thomas J. Kane
Harvard Graduate School of Education
Center for Education Policy Research
50 Church St., 4th Floor
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/496-4359
E-Mail: kaneto@gse.harvard.edu

Douglas O. Staiger
Dartmouth College
Department of Economics
HB6106, 301 Rockefeller Hall
Hanover, NH 03755-3514
Tel: 603/646-2979
Fax: 603/646-2122
E-Mail: douglas.staiger@dartmouth.edu
AB  - This paper uses data from the implementation of a district-wide public school choice plan in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina to estimate preferences for school characteristics and examine their implications for the local educational market. We use parental rankings of their top three choices of schools matched with student demographic and test score data to estimate a mixed-logit discrete choice demand model for schools. We find that parents value proximity highly and the preference attached to a school's mean test score increases with student's income and own academic ability. We also find considerable heterogeneity in preferences even after controlling for income, academic achievement and race, with strong negative correlations between preferences for academics and school proximity. Simulations of parental responses to test score improvements at a school suggest that the demand response at high-performing schools would be larger than the response at low-performing schools, leading to disparate demand-side pressure to improve performance under school choice.
ER  -