Essays on Educational Choices and Integration

Sammanfattning: Are Parents Uninformed? The Impact of School Performance Information on School Choices and School Assignments. We study the impact of providing information about schools' performances on households' choice of school. A randomly selected subset of households with children about to start middle school in a Swedish municipality were provided with information about the schools’ performances on standardized tests. We find that this information made them more likely to apply to the top-performing schools, compared to households in the control group. The effect is driven by native children and children to high-skilled parents. Next, we simulate how this would affect the allocation of students to schools, under the assumption that all households would have access to this information. As expected, enrollment in top-performing schools increase, but the effect is muted by the schools' capacity constraints. Again, native and high-skilled drive the effect, by shifting their applications from mid- to top-performing schools. This leads to reduced school segregation by foreign background as children with a foreign background are overrepresented at the top-performing schools to begin with. Furthermore, school segregation by parental education increases slightly as children with highly educated parents congregate at the top-performing schools.