Resumen de Structural Estimation of a Model of School Choices: the Boston Mechanism vs. its Alternatives

Caterina Calsamiglia, Chao Fu, Maia Güell

• We develop a model of school choices by households under the popular Boston mechanism (BM) and a new method to fully solve household problem that is infeasible to solve via traditional method. We estimate the joint distribution of household preferences and sophistication types using administrative data from Barcelona. Our counterfactual policy analyses show that a change from BM to the student deferred acceptance mechanism would create more losers than winners and decrease the average welfare by 1,020 euros, while a change from BM to the top trading cycles mechanism has the opposite effect and increases the average welfare by 460 euros.