Long Run Effects of Free School Choice: College Attainment, Employment, Earnings, and Social Outcomes at Adulthood

Victor Lavy

NBER Working Paper No. 20843
Issued in January 2015
NBER Program(s):   CH   ED   LS

Research in economics of education about the effectiveness of educational programs and interventions have centered primarily on standardized test scores as a measure of success. However, since the ultimate goal of education is to improve lifetime well-being, attention shifted recently to long term consequences at adulthood, for example post-secondary schooling. However, the type of educational interventions studied is still limited and much remained to be unraveled. In this paper I study the long term consequences of free school choice by taking advantage of an experiment conducted two decades ago in the city of Tel Aviv, Israel. This school choice program was very effective in improving high school attainment and cognitive achievements six years later (Lavy 2010) and now I examine whether these effects persist beyond high school. The results indicate that treated students experience significant gains in post-secondary enrollment and in completed years of education and also have higher earnings at age 30. These significant positive treatment effects reflect mainly an increase in academic education, through increased enrollment in three-years academic colleges but not in research universities, and some shift away from vocational education at adulthood. Additional gains are reductions in eligibility and recipiency of disability welfare allowances.

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w20843