Information shocks and parental response in education. A case study of an open government initiative

Abstract

Although a large body of literature has examined the effects of open government from a theoretical perspective, evidence on the empirical effects is still limited. This paper analyses parental response to an open government initiative consisting of the publication on a government website of school inspection reports. As an indicator of school quality, school inspection reports allow parents to make well informed school choices for their children. We employ a unique natural experiment in Belgium where schools are randomly selected for inspection, and online school inspection reports are the first and only source of objective quality data publicly available. This results in exogenous information shocks. Our findings indicate that information about school quality strongly affects school choice. After the publication, inspected schools experience higher enrolments, with effects driven by positively evaluated schools and rural schools. No differentiated response is observed by schools' socioeconomic composition. We interpret these findings as evidence that parents made extensive use of the government website on which school inspection reports were published.