Seminario di Marco Bertoni

ore 12.30 Sala Seminari – I° piano, Palazzo Levi Cases, Via del Santo 33

14.02.2017

What's in a Name? Expectations, heuristics and choice during a period of radical school reform in England

Seminario di Marco Bertoni, Università di Padova

Schools policy worldwide has sought to incentivize improvement and facilitate matching by introducing reforms that promote institutional autonomy and school choice. Understanding the way in which families form preferences during these periods of reform is crucially important for understanding the policy impacts. Therefore, we study the effects on choice of a recent shock to the school system in England – the academy programme – which gave existing state schools greater autonomy, but provided limited information on the benefits. Our analysis uses administrative data on school applications for three cohorts of students to estimate whether academy conversion changes a school’s popularity. We find that families – particularly non-poor, White British – rank converted schools higher on average. Changes in other observable school characteristics cannot explain this updating of preferences. The patterns suggest families combine the signal of conversion with prior information on quality and popularity as a heuristic for assessing a school’s expected future performance.