要旨：This study examines the impacts of eliminating school zones, focusing on the commuting behavior of high school students. To address this issue, we exploit the reform of the education system of public high schools in Nagasaki City, Japan. Before the reform in 2002, the local government assigned students to equalize the educational level among schools. While the reform enabled the students to choose a school on their own, the gap in academic performance among schools has widened. We found that one possible reason for this gap is the concentration of students from highly educated areas to schools with location advantages regarding transport accessibility and urban amenities.

参加を希望される方は8月7日（水）までに noriko(at)kier.kyoto-u.ac.jp までご連絡ください。

If you would like to attend, please contact noriko(at)kier.kyoto-u.ac.jp by Wednesday, August 7.

Program (PDF)

【Paper】

Abstract: We explore the impact of public school assignment reforms by building a households’ school choice model with two key features—(1) endogenous residential location choice and (2) opt-out to outside schooling options. Households decide where to live taking into account that locations determine access-to-school—admissions probabilities and commuting distances to schools. Households are heterogeneous both in observed and unobserved characteristics. We estimate the model using administrative data from New York City’s middle school choice system. Variation from a boundary discontinuity design separately identifies preferences for access-to-school from other location amenities. Residential sorting based on access-to-school preference explains 30% of the gap in test scores of schools attended by minority students versus their peers. If households’ residential locations were fixed, a reform that introduces purely lottery-based admissions to schools in lower- and mid-Manhattan would reduce the cross-racial gap by 7%. However, households’ endogenous location choices dampen the effect by half.