Abstract:

Matching mechanisms are crucial in centralized school choice settings and college admissions. This paper studies the world’s largest matching market, Chinese college admissions, and provides novel empirical evidence comparing the Immediate Acceptance (IA) mechanism and the parallel mechanism, a variant of the Deferred Acceptance mechanism. We use administrative data on millions of students and the staggered reform by provinces. Switching from IA to the parallel mechanism reduced unfairness, measured by justified envy, as well as undesirable student outcomes, including null admission and retaking. The paper also highlights the differences across the commonly used intensive-margin stability measures.

Speaker: Associate Professor Song Yang (Department of Economics, Colgate University)

Date and Time: Thursday, June 27, 2024, 13:00—14:30

Venue: Conference Room 347, Qiushi Building

Language: Chinese and English

Host: Assistant Professor Zou Xianqiang

Participants: All faculty and students are warmly welcome.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Song Yang is currently an Associate Professor (tenured) in the Department of Economics at Colgate University. She has previously been a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Department of Economics, a visiting assistant professor at the Education Policy Initiative of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, and a visiting scholar in the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests focus on education economics, behavioral economics, and development economics. Her research topics include the impact of college admissions reform on fairness, the effects of changes in education policy on school choice, and the evaluation and analysis of various educational and other public policy reforms. Her research has been published in journals such as the American Journal of Health Economics, China Economic Review, Economic Inquiry, Journal of Comparative Economics, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics, and Regional Science and Urban Economics. She also serves as an anonymous reviewer for several economics and education journals.