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Win or Lose: Residential Sorting After a School Choice Lottery

Andrew Bibler1; Stephen B. Billings2

1 University of Nevada, Las Vegas · 2 University of Colorado Boulder

The Review of Economics and Statistics 2020 open access

We examine residential relocation and opting out of the public school system in response to school choice lottery outcomes. We show that rising kindergartners and sixth graders who lose a school choice lottery are 6 percentage points more likely to exit the district or change neighborhood schools (20% to 30% increase) and make up 0.14 to 0.35 standard deviations in average school test scores between lottery assignment and attendance the following year. Using hedonic-based estimates of land prices, we estimate that lottery losers pay a 9% to 11% housing price premium for access to a school with a 1 standard deviation higher mean test score.

DOI
10.1162/rest_a_00868
Volume
102 (3)
Pages
457-472
Language
en
Export
BibTeX
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