Research projects

A first part took advantage of a natural experiment which took place in Barcelona in order to verify empirically that around 70% of families systematically choose the neighbourhood school, even if the school that corresponds to the "neighbourhood school" changes. Other theoretical work demonstrates that, if there are "bad" schools, the families are effectively obliged to request the neighbourhood school in order to avoid ending up in the bad school. It also demonstrates that, if there are "bad schools", even if another mechanism proposed in the literature is implemented, known as Deferred Acceptance, the families would indicate their real preferences, but the final allocation would mean that the families would end up in the neighbourhood in any case. The second part formally analysed the relationship between the allocation mechanism and the resulting distribution of families in neighbourhoods and schools.