June
27, 2024
SLHR Labor Economics Lecture Series: “Matching Mechanisms, Justified Envy, and College Admissions Outcomes”
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.
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