Preferences, selection, and value added: A structural approach

What do applicants take into consideration when choosing a high school? To what extent do schools contribute to their students' academic success? To answer these questions, we model students' preferences and obtain average valuation placed on each school. We then investigate what drives these valuations by carefully controlling for endogeneity using a set of creative instruments suggested by our model. We find that valuation is based on a school's location, its selectivity as measured by its cutoff score, value added and past performance in university entrance exams. However, cutoffs affect school valuation an order of magnitude more than does value added.