Distorted quality signals in school markets

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Cuesta, Jose Ignacio; Gonzalez, Felipe; Philippi, Cristian Larroulet
• 署名单位: Stanford University; Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile; University of Cambridge
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0304-3878
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2020.102532
• 发表日期: 2020
• 关键词: accountability; schools; QUALITY; disclosure; CHOICE

摘要

Information plays a key role in markets with consumer choice. In education, data on schools is often gathered through standardized testing. However, the use of these tests has been controversial because of distortions in the metric itself. We study the Chilean educational market and document that low-performing students are underrepresented in test days, generating distortions in school quality information. These distorted quality signals affect parents' school choice and induce misallocation of public programs. These results provide novel evidence for the costs that distortions in quality signals generated by standardized tests in accountability systems impose on educational markets.