Working Papers | ConsiliumBots

A Decade of Centralized School Choice Admission in Chile: Achievements and Challenges

Issue 07 | October 21, 2026 | Chile

Authors: Christopher A. Neilson

This paper reviews the first decade of Chile's Sistema de Admisión Escolar (SAE), examining evidence-based policy development and system performance. Built on established design principles and institutional innovations, SAE evolved through government–researcher collaboration that translated evidence on information frictions into personalized guidance. National assignment rates are internationally comparable, and disadvantaged students gained access to oversubscribed schools. The scale of the aftermarket underscores the importance of coordination and equity beyond the main round. These gains coexist with local congestion, school exits, and limited entry. Continuous learning can improve allocation, while school supply and year-round admissions rules shape its reach.

Keywords: school choice, public policy, digital platform, education reform

JEL: I21, I28, H52, D47, O38

Versions:

Version 1 · October 2026 (current)
First working-paper version.

Segregation and Elite School Exit in Chile: Equilibrium Considerations for Equitable School Admission Systems

Issue 06 | Forthcoming | Chile

Authors: Ignacio Lepe, Tamara Muñoz-Ojeda, Christopher A. Neilson

Chile's 2015–2019 reforms ended school-run selection, phased out co-pay, and restricted profit in the voucher sector, routing admissions through a centralized assignment system (SAE). Combining administrative data, an event study, a structural counterfactual, and a lottery instrument, we document four results. First, after SAE arrives, the share of low-income (priority) students at oversubscribed schools rises by about 8 percentage points relative to other schools within six years, closing a fifth to a quarter of the pre-SAE gap, with larger gains in entry grades. Second, the reform coincides with a supply response: voucher-to-private conversions spike, concentrated among high-fee, low-poverty schools. Third, inside SAE the converting schools would enroll 68 percent priority students, against 11 percent as private schools, diverting some 154,000 priority student-years from integrated schooling. Fourth, a seat at an oversubscribed school raises tenth-grade mathematics by 0.07 standard deviations (0.09 for priority students), through school effectiveness rather than peers. Centralized assignment widens access where it binds, but raises the value of exit for the schools that matter most.

Keywords: school choice, centralized assignment, school segregation, vouchers, school supply, Chile

JEL: I22, I24, I28, D47

Making Algorithmic Transparency Meaningful: Evidence from Chile's National School Admissions Platform

Issue 05 | August 10, 2026 | Chile

Authors: Christopher A. Neilson, Exequiel Medina, Leonardo Ortiz Mesías

Governments worldwide increasingly deploy algorithmic systems to allocate scarce public goods. The dominant transparency paradigm focuses on expert audit rather than citizen comprehension. We propose a substantive standard, Meaningful Algorithmic Transparency (MAT): information delivered to affected users must be proactive (placed into awareness, not merely published), tailored (referring to the user's decision context), and actionable (delivered before the decision closes). We develop the argument through Chile's Sistema de Admisión Escolar (SAE), a national school admissions platform serving roughly 470,000 families per year. Two measurements document the residual comprehension gap. Linking the SAE Satisfaction Survey to administrative truth for four cycles (2020–2023, N≈140,000), we show that families systematically overstate their placement probability: among applicants the platform can pre-identify as high-risk, the median family believes the risk is around 20% when it is in fact around 80%. The bias is uneven: at the same objective risk, lower-SES applicants understate by more, with a conditional gradient that is statistically stable across all four cycles. In the SAE Parent Surveys (2023–25), self-reported familiarity with a key procedural rule nearly doubled across cycles while verifiable comprehension barely moved (2.3% to 4.9%). The comprehension gap is therefore persistent and unevenly distributed, falling more heavily on the families whose outcomes most depend on effective information delivery, even when the underlying mechanism gives those families priority. We propose six operational components and show how Chile's existing regulatory architecture (access-to-information law, algorithmic-transparency recommendations, data-protection safeguards, and sector-specific regulation) can be articulated to make the standard enforceable.

Keywords: algorithmic transparency, automated decision-making, meaningful transparency, citizen comprehension, algorithmic allocation, public sector algorithms

Versions:

Version 1 · August 2026 (current)
First working-paper version.

The Global Gender Gap in STEM Applications: Pipeline vs. Choice

Issue 03 | September 05, 2026 | Australia, Brazil, Chile, China, Finland, Greece, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Uganda

Authors: Isaac Ahimbisibwe, Adam Altmejd, Georgy Artemov, Andrés Barrios-Fernández, Aspasia Bizopoulou, Martti Kaila, Jin-Tan Liu, Rigissa Megalokonomou, José Montalbán, Christopher A. Neilson, Sebastián Otero, Jintao Sun, Xiaoyang Ye

Women make up only 35% of STEM graduates worldwide, a share unchanged for a decade. We separate two sources of this gap: gender differences in academic preparation (the pipeline) and in application decisions (the choice gap). We use data from ten centralized university admissions systems where eligibility is set by academic performance and places are assigned through variants of deferred acceptance, so students have little incentive to misreport. We focus on high-achieving students, for whom access constraints are least likely to bind, which isolates application behavior from the most obvious barriers. The pipeline gap varies widely, from a female disadvantage in Uganda to a female advantage in Sweden, and broadly tracks labor-market gender parity. The choice gap does not. It is large and negative everywhere: even among top scorers, women are about 24 percentage points less likely than men to rank a STEM program first, and the gap exceeds 20 points in eight of the ten settings. The pattern holds when STEM is counted anywhere on the list, not only first. Closing the pipeline gap entirely would still leave high-achieving STEM applicants majority male, between 57% and 75%, in every setting we study.

Keywords: gender inequality, STEM gender gap, centralized application platforms

JEL: I23, I24, J16, D47

Versions:

Version 2 · September 2026 (current)
Revised version with extended threshold analysis and an institutional appendix.
Version 1 · November 2025
First working-paper version.

Designing Smart School Choice Recommendations: Heuristics for Sure Alternatives

Issue 02 | June 17, 2025 | Chile

Authors: Ignacio Lepe

The proposed research introduces a school choice policy that recommends guaranteed school alternatives for students left unassigned under stable matching. Leveraging revealed preferences, it designs a personalized recommendation mechanism that offers voluntary allocations to unlisted but potentially desirable nearby schools. Results indicate that in the main round, the mechanism can (i) reduce the proportion of unmatched applicants by up to 50%, (ii) increase expected aggregate utility by 2–6%, and (iii) concentrate utility gains among applicants who apply to oversubscribed programs. Overall, the policy offers a cost-effective and scalable solution to improve match outcomes by redistributing excess demand within centralized assignment systems.

Keywords: school choice, market design, sure alternative

JEL: C78, D47, I21, I28, D83

Versions:

Version 1 · June 2025 (current)
First working-paper version.

Approximating the Equilibrium Effects of Informed School Choice

Issue 01 | October 23, 2026 | Chile

Authors: Claudia Allende, Francisco Gallego, Christopher Neilson

We study how information about school quality affects families' choices and how scaling up the intervention changes its impact. In a randomized trial in Chile, we offer families a short video and a personalized school report card before they enroll their children. Treated families choose schools with higher test scores and value added. Among families reached before enrollment, treated children score about 0.2 standard deviations higher in fourth grade, with positive but less precise estimates on later assessments. We embed the experimentally identified demand shift in a structural model of school choice and competition to study equilibrium effects at scale. Capacity constraints and centralized assignment attenuate the demand-side gains, but the same shift in demand strengthens schools' incentives to improve quality, and the supply response roughly offsets the congestion effect. More generally, equilibrium scaling can alter experimental effects in either direction because congestion and endogenous quality responses work against each other. We use the model to guide the design of a follow-up cluster-randomized experiment, focusing on the tradeoff between precision and contamination from equilibrium spillovers.

Keywords: information, incentives, school choice, supply side, randomized controlled trial

JEL: L1, L38, I2, O1

Versions:

Version 3 · October 2026 (current)
October revision reconciled with the latest NBER paper; includes online appendix.
Version 2 · September 2026
Third-round revision submitted to the Review of Economic Studies.
Version 1 · July 2019
First working-paper version.

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