Ethnic homophily in School Choices

2025

1. Ethnic homophily in School Choices

   Bernd Beber, Macartan Humphreys, and Lennard Naumann

   2025

   We investigate parental school choice in Berlin, Germany. Anecdotal evidence suggests that non-migrant ’natives’ take steps to avoid or seek out catchment area schools due to the ethnic composition of student bodies. Indeed, school segregation has been documented across Europe, but the lack of high-resolution data on school choice and migrant populations has made it difficult to precisely show the extent to which schools are more (or less) segregated than we would expect given catchment area demographics and to analyze the process that leads to such segregation. We contribute to this debate with an analysis of a never-before-used dataset of 35,000 school choice forms that parents must complete to enroll their child in elementary school. We combine this data with a newly compiled set of administrative data on the street block and school zone level for the years 2000 to 2018, which includes demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, student population indicators, various school attributes, and school performance metrics.