High school admission reform in China: a welfare analysis
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High school admission reform in China: a welfare analysis Tong Wang1
· Congyi Zhou2
Received: 5 February 2020 / Accepted: 8 September 2020 / Published online: 21 September 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract In recent years, China has experienced a trend of changing from the Boston mechanism (BM) to the Chinese parallel mechanism for high school and college admissions. Using a unique data set from the high-school-assignment system in China that combines survey data eliciting students’ school preferences with administrative data that cover students’ school choices and admission records under both mechanisms, this paper compares the welfare performance of BM, the Chinese parallel mechanism, and the Deferred Acceptance (DA) mechanism. We find a non-monotonic relationship between the manipulability and efficiency of school choice mechanisms: DA yields significantly higher welfare than the Chinese parallel mechanism and BM, but BM yields higher welfare than Chinese parallel mechanism although not significantly. We also find that switching from BM to Chinese parallel mechanism hurts students regardless of their socioeconomic status, but benefits students with higher test scores. Students with lower socioeconomic status benefit more than those with higher socioeconomic status when switching from BM to DA, but when switching from Chinese parallel mechanism to DA, students with higher socioeconomic status benefit more. Keywords Welfare · Matching · Boston mechanism · Chinese parallel mechanism · Deferred acceptance mechanism, manipulation
Tong is deeply grateful to Roger Myerson, Robert LaLonde, Brent Hickman, and Seth Zimmerman for their continuous guidance on this project. We are also grateful to Eric Budish, Michael Dinerstein, Steven Durlauf, Ali Hortacsu, Fuhito Kojima, Doron Ravid, Alvin Roth, Shigehiro Serizawa, Ning Sun, Alex Teyteboym, Yosuke Yasuda, three anonymous referees, and all participants in Chicago Harris PhD Workshop, Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory Conference 2017, University of Tsukuba Research Seminar, and Stigler Lunch at University of Chicago for their valuable advice. All errors are our own.
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Tong Wang [email protected] Congyi Zhou [email protected]
1
Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan
2
Department of Politics, New York University, New York, USA
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T. Wang, C. Zhou
JEL Classification C78 · D82 · I23 · I28
1 Introduction School choice, namely, giving students the chance to select which school to attend subject to schools’ capacity constraints, is a widely discussed topic in education economics. Students have different preferences over schools and meanwhile, are endowed with different priorities to different schools. How to assign students to schools under quota constraints is an important question. To prevent inequality in education resource allocation, most countries do not assign students based on how much they are willing to pay. And to reduce the probability that students are unable to be as
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