Description:

Genia Rachkovski:  "The Substitutability of Religiosity and Quality: School Attribute Information and Parental Choice of School Religiosity"

Abstract: In many countries, households choose between religious and secular schools, impacting preferences, beliefs and labor market outcomes. Given the importance of this choice, it is paramount to explore the preference structure underlying it and to identify circumstances that can lead households to choose schools that do not align most strongly with their religious preferences. In this paper, we investigate how attributes such as average test scores, school violence levels, and student satisfaction affect school selection. We exploit a natural experiment of an information disclosure combined with a unique setting in which both religious and secular public schooling options were available to households, to estimate school choice trade-offs using a Diff-in-Diff analysis. We find that households are willing to sacrifice religiosity for better school attributes, especially among religious households, suggesting a lower threshold for trade-offs. Furthermore, we find that while both high and low SES households seem to value test score disparities, only lower SES households are willing to trade off religiosity preferences for improvements related to school violence and student satisfaction ratings. Implementing an IV approach, we find evidence that the choice of an alternative schooling religiosity, induced by quality differences, may lead to long run changes in religious preferences and shifts in academic pursuits towards fields with higher labor market returns. Finally, estimating parameters of households' utility function using a discrete choice model further supports our results.