The Role of Awareness, Information Gathering and Processing in School Choice

Ghazala Azmat and José García-Montalvo

No 639, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

Abstract: This paper studies the determinants of school choice, focusing on the role of information. We consider how parents' search efforts and their capacity to process information (i.e., to correctly assess schools) affect the quality of the schools they choose for their children. Using a novel dataset, we are able to identify parents' awareness of schools in their neighborhood and measure their capacity to rank the quality of the school with respect to the official rankings. We find that parents' education and wealth are important factors in determining their level of school awareness and information gathering. Moreover, these search efforts have important consequences in terms of the quality of school choice.

Keywords: school choice; education in developing country; information gathering; household behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D1 I21 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-lab and nep-ure
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Related works:
Working Paper: The role of awareness, information gathering and processing in school choice (2012)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bge:wpaper:639

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