(joint with Maia Güell)
School choice has been one of the most widely used and discussed policy in education. Children were usually assigned to the closest school from their homes. But in the last decades new rules have been implemented and parents have been asked about their preferences for schools to assign their children accordingly. An array of studies have looked at the impact of choice on outcomes in educations. A recent and important literature on the mechanism design problem of school choice has shown that under the so-called Boston mechanism parents may not have incentives to provide their true preferences, but the theory remains silent as to what parents should do in equilibrium. We use a change in the neighborhood design in Barcelona, where the Boston mechanism is used, to show that parents choose from the schools they have highest priority for, the neighborhood schools, excluding any other school they prefer from their submitted list. This implies that the Boston mechanism, under the presence of priorities, performs poorly in terms of assigning children according to preferences. This result has important implications for the emprical literature evaluating the effect of school choice on outcomes, such as in Lavy (2010) or Hastings, Kane and Steiger (2008), where this mechanism is governing choice.