Schelling sorting or moving to opportunity? Evidence from school choice in Berlin

We investigate how parental school choice interacts with bureaucratic decision making to exacerbate or counter identity based segregation in schools.  Anecdotal evidence suggests that non-migrant "natives" take steps to avoid catchment area schools due to the ethnic composition of student bodies. We study a dataset of 35,000 individual decisions by Berlin parents that documents requests for transfers of elementary school children from their zoned schools. Combining this choice data with data on school location, quality, local demographics, and bureaucratic decisions and using a geographic regression discontinuity design, we find clear evidence that assignment to high migrant schools leads natives to seek to exit at extremely high rates. However, contrary to Schelling-type homophily logics, migrants seek to transfer at similar rates. Bureaucratic responses to these competing requests ultimately results in (moderately) greater equality in access to high quality schools, as measured by school evaluations, than would be expected based on residency allocations alone. 

Macartan Humphreys is director of the research unit Institutions and Political Inequality at the WZB and honorary professor of social sciences at Humboldt University and at Trinity College Dublin.

Please note that this event takes place in English only with no translation.

The event is part of the WZB Talks series.