School choice may lead to improvements in school productivity if parents' choices reward effective schools and punish ineffective ones. This mechanism requires parents to choose schools based on causal effectiveness rather than peer characteristics. We study relationships among parent preferences, peer quality, and causal effects on outcomes for applicants to New York City's centralized high school assignment mechanism. We use applicants' rank-ordered choice lists to measure preferences and to construct selection-corrected estimates of treatment effects on test scores, high school graduation, college attendance, and college quality. Parents prefer schools that enroll high-achieving peers, and these schools generate larger improvements in short- and long-run student outcomes. Preferences are unrelated to school effectiveness and academic match quality after controlling for peer quality.

中文翻译：

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父母重视学校的效能吗？

如果父母的选择奖励有效的学校并惩罚无效的学校，那么学校的选择可能会导致学校生产力的提高。这种机制要求父母根据因果关系而非同伴特征选择学校。我们研究了父母偏好，同伴素质以及因果关系对纽约市中央高中分配机制申请人的结果之间的关系。我们使用申请人的按顺序排列的选择列表来衡量偏好，并构建对测试成绩，高中毕业，大学出勤率和大学质量的治疗效果的选择校正估计。家长更喜欢招收高成就同学的学校，这些学校在短期和长期学生成绩方面都有较大的提高。