Perceived Ability and School Choices

This paper studies how youths’ self-perceptions of ability affect their sorting patterns across schools. We design and implement a field experiment in which ninth-graders from less advantaged backgrounds in Mexico City are provided with individualized feedback about their performance on an achievement test. The treatment shifts both the mean and the variance of the subjective distributions of academic ability. This variation is embedded into a discrete choice model that characterizes the channels through which perceived ability shapes individual preferences over school characteristics. Follow-up data on schooling outcomes suggest that the information intervention improved the match between students and education choices