Strategic Residential Location Choice: How Parents Game Priorities in School Matching
中文摘要
理论与实践中采用的大多数择校匹配机制均假设学校依据无法被操纵的特征对学生进行排序。然而,家长可能有激励谎报用于确定学校优先权的信息,例如居住地址与学校的邻近程度,尤其是当此类虚假陈述难以察觉或处罚极轻时。一旦学校优先权遭到操纵,匹配机制的效率与公平便可能受到影响。利用维也纳市33万名儿童的官方登记数据,我证明这种策略性家长行为确实存在,并为其普遍程度确立了下限。一些家长在申请入学前几个月将子女登记在另一个居住地址,并在子女成功入学后将官方居住地址改回原址。移民及教育水平较低的家庭钻制度空子的可能性更低。一项针对1300名一年级学生家长的调查显示,这种行为会对诚实守规的家长和孩子造成负面影响。
Abstract
Most school choice matching mechanisms employed in theory and practice assume that schools rank students by characteristics that cannot be manipulated. However, parents may have incentives to misstate information used for determining school priorities, such as the proximity of the residential address to a school, particularly when such misrepresentations are difficult to detect or carry minimal penalties. If manipulation of school priorities occurs, the efficiency and fairness of the matching mechanism may be affected. Using official registration data on 330,000 children from the city of Vienna, I demonstrate that such strategic parental behavior occurs and establish lower bounds for its prevalence. Some parents register their child at a different residential address a few months before applying to a school and change the official residential address back to the original address after the child has been successfully enrolled. Migrants and families with lower education levels are less likely to game the system. A survey among 1,300 parents of first graders suggests that this negatively affects parents and children who are sincere.