TY  - JOUR
AU  - Mizala,Alejandra
AU  - Urquiola,Miguel
TI  - School Markets:  The Impact of Information Approximating Schools' Effectiveness
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 13676
PY  - 2007
Y2  - November 2007
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13676
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13676.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Alejandra Mizala
Center for Applied Economics
Department of Industrial Engineering
University of Chile
Avenida Republica 701
Santiago, Chile
E-Mail: amizala@dii.uchile.cl

Miguel Urquiola
Columbia University
SIPA and Economics Department
1022 IAB, MC 3308
420 West 118th Street
New York, NY 10027
Tel: 212/854-3769
Fax: 212/854-8059
E-Mail: msu2101@columbia.edu
AB  - The impact of competition on academic outcomes is likely to depend on whether parents are informed about schools' effectiveness or valued added (which may or may not be correlated with absolute measures of their quality), and on whether this information influences their school choices, thereby affecting schools' market outcomes.  To explore these issues, this paper considers Chile's SNED program, which seeks to identify effective schools, selecting them from within "homogeneous groups" of arguably comparable institutions.  Its results are widely disseminated, and the information it generates is quite different from that conveyed by a simple test-based ranking of schools (which in Chile, turns out to largely resemble a ranking based on socioeconomic status).  We rely on a sharp regression discontinuity to estimate the effect that being identified as a SNED winner has on schools’ enrollment, tuition levels, and socioeconomic composition.  Through five applications of the program, we find no consistent evidence that winning a SNED award affects these outcomes.  This suggests that information on school effectiveness -- at least as it is calculated and delivered by the SNED -- might not much affect school markets.
ER  -