Events at CERGE-EI

Prof. Christopher Neilson

Yale University, United States

Join online
Meeting number: 2740 455 9559
Meeting password: 343251

 The seminar draws on the following work: 

The Rise of Coordinated Choice and Assignment Systems in Education Markets Around the World
Abstract: This paper reviews current policies regulating access to education worldwide and documents the rise of platforms implementing coordinated choice and assignment systems in education markets. It reviews primary, secondary, and higher education markets in 149 countries to determine the use of coordinated systems for processing applications and assignments. The paper also documents the policy details surrounding these systems, focusing on assignment mechanisms, priority criteria, preference reporting, application timing, and information provision. The analysis reveals a substantial increase in the adoption of coordinated systems, with 60 percent of the countries reviewed implementing some form of coordinated mechanism to determine access to education. The study shows that policy choices “in the wild” exhibit significant heterogeneity and often create incentives for families to behave strategically, regardless of the specific assignment mechanism used. Finally, many of the policies reviewed do not align with best practices, presenting a unique opportunity to enhance equity and efficiency through evidence-based adjustments. The trend in adoption suggests that many low- and middle-income countries will implement digital platforms to coordinate access to education and could look to lessons from empirical market design when creating new systems, potentially leapfrogging to the frontier of systems that provide access to education.

A Decade of Centralized School Choice Admission in Chile: Achievements & Challenges
Abstract: Chile's Sistema de Admisión Escolar (SAE) replaced a fragmented, often discretionary admissions process with a transparent, strategy-proof deferred acceptance mechanism that spans both public and subsidized private schools. Using nationwide administrative records, household surveys, and multiple randomized and quasi-experimental evaluations, the project traces how ten years of SAE affected match quality, access to higher value-added schools, and perceptions of fairness, with especially large gains for disadvantaged students. At the same time, the evidence shows that behavioral frictions—short and risky application lists, limited awareness of nearby options, and biased beliefs about quality and price—still constrain outcomes. Information tools such as real-time risk warnings, personalized recommendation reports, and the MIME explorer meaningfully improve applications and reduce non-assignment risks but also create congestion and spillovers that must be managed in general equilibrium. The paper concludes by analyzing the new Anótate en la Lista aftermarket platform and distilling governance lessons for algorithmic transparency and incremental mechanism improvements.