We study how demand responds to the rebranding of existing state schools as autonomous ‘academies’ in the context of a radical and large-scale reform to the English education system. The academy programme encouraged schools to opt out of local state control and funding, but provided parents and students with limited information on the expected benefits. We use administrative data on school applications for three cohorts of students to estimate whether this rebranding changes schools’ relative popularity. We find that families – particularly higher income, White British – are more likely to rank converted schools above non-converted schools on their applications. We also find that it is mainly schools that are high-performing, popular and proximate to families’ homes that attract extra demand after conversion. Overall, the patterns we document suggest that families read academy conversion as a signal of future quality gains – although this signal is in part misleading as we find limited evidence that conversion causes improved performance.

中文翻译：

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激进学校改革时期的学校选择。来自英国学院转换的证据

我们研究了在对英语教育系统进行彻底和大规模改革的背景下，需求如何响应将现有公立学校重新命名为自治“学院”。学院计划鼓励学校选择退出地方国家的控制和资助，但向家长和学生提供的预期收益的信息有限。我们使用三组学生的学校申请管理数据来估计这次品牌重塑是否会改变学校的相对受欢迎程度。我们发现家庭——尤其是收入较高的英国白人——更有可能在申请中将转校学校排在未转校学校之上。我们还发现，在转换后吸引额外需求的主要是那些表现出色、受欢迎且靠近家庭住宅的学校。全面的，