The quality of the match between students and schools affects learning, but little is known about the magnitude of these effects or how they respond to changes in market structure. I develop a quantitative equilibrium model of school competition with horizontal competition in match quality. I estimate the model using data from Pakistan, a country with high private enrollment, and (1) quantify the importance of good matches, (2) show that profit-maximizing private schools' choices of quality advantage wealthier students, increasing inequality and reducing welfare and learning, and (3) provide intuition for when interventions in the market are valuable.

We document an important consequence of bride price, a payment made by the groom to the bride’s family at marriage. Revisiting Indonesia’s school construction program, we find that among ethnic groups without the custom, it had no effect on girls’ schooling. Among ethnic groups with the custom, it had large positive effects. We show (theoretically and empirically) that this is because a daughter’s education, by increasing the amount of money parents receive at marriage, generates an additional incentive for parents to educate their daughters. We replicate these findings in Zambia, a country that had a similar large-scale school construction program.