On Education and Choice

Abstract in English

This dissertation contains three self-contained essays on education and information. The first paper, “Schooling for Profit: Long-run Effects of Private Providers in Public Education”, focuses on Sweden’s charter school sector, where publicly funded for-profit and non-profit providers compete directly with public schools. I show that charter attendance lowers long-run earnings, with for-profits doing so mainly through cost-cutting on teachers and non-profits through specialization in low-return programs. Students choose for-profits primarily based on features other than long-run impacts, which explains their large market share. The second paper, “The Productivity of Public and Private Preschools (and Schools): Evidence from India” (with Mauricio Romero and Abhijeet Singh), compares public and private pre- and primary school education in India. We find substantially higher learning gains in private preschools but no private advantage at the primary level, suggesting that private providers can fill gaps where public options are weak. The third paper, “Can Ratings Mitigate Consumer Inattention? Evidence from the Swedish Housing Market”, studies a rating system capturing the financial risk associated with apartment purchases. I find that these ratings affect apartment prices and agents’ pricing decisions only when made salient in online listings, highlighting that information design is crucial for consumers to act on ordinal information.