La pubblicazione delle graduatorie delle scuole orienta la scelta di iscrizione degli studenti? Un'analisi empirica su dati piemontesi

In this research, using data from school choice programme in Piedmont, we attempt to answer few basic questions on students' school selection. A lot of studies argue that students choose the best school, given the available information. Is this true? Do students react to new information about schools? Are students interested to choose? Since 2009, Giovanni Agnelli Foundation (FGA) published, in the main newspapers and in their website, rankings of the high schools located in Piedmont. What is the effect of this new programme? Among the different agents interested in information about school quality, we are concerned with the main beneficiary: students. Increasing available information shall help students in choosing the better schools. To see this, we decide to analysis the number of new enrolments in each school. Increasing or decreasing first year enrolments shall be explained by better or worse ranking positions. We investigate the effect of the publication of rankings on students' choice using a simple regression model specification. In particular, we study two kinds of models, linear and quadratic. We reject the linearity hypothesis, and conclude that rankings have a quadratic effect on number of students. The results indicate a negative and statistically significant effect on new school enrolments. However, the magnitude is not always so indicative. Increase or decrease of about 0.23 per cent for each position gained or lost in rankings is true only for the first positions. For the following positions effects are, most of the time, almost zero. Furthermore, splitting the sample by year, we obtained that the result holds only for the first year (2009). One reason could be the different release timing. The first ranking has had more time (one month) with respect to the following years (in 2010 a week and in 2012 published even after the deadline). Furthermore, we find that for the last position rankings, there exists an ¿opposite¿ effect. If a school is in a bad position, to decrease further causes an increase in the number of new enrolments. A possible explanation of this phenomenon could be the choice of a ¿bad quality¿ school by students that prefer to study less or think to have worse performances. The structure of the thesis is as follows. We first provide a brief overview of what is choice in education, and in Chapter C we describe the role of information and, in particular, their publications. Chapter D deals with the discussion of a basic framework for some issues that are common to all attempts to compare institutions by using outcome data. The Giovanni Agnelli Foundation is presented in Chapter E. In the following two chapters we describe our empirical work. In Chapter F available data are examined, while, finally, in chapter G statistical modelling and the corresponding results are presented. The final section attempts to bring the discussion back to common themes, and summarizes our opinions on the possible effectiveness of rankings.