Strategic residential location choice: how parents game priorities in school matching

Most school choice matching mechanisms employed in theory and practice assume that schools rank students by characteristics that cannot be manipulated. However, parents may have incentives to misstate information used for determining school priorities, such as proximity of residential address to a school, in particular when such misstatements are hard to detect or not sufficiently penalized. If such manipulation of school priorities occurs, the efficiency and fairness of the whole matching mechanism may be affected. Using official registration data from the City of Vienna, I show that such strategic parent behavior indeed occurs, and derive lower bounds for its extent.
Some parents register their child at a different residential address a few months before applying to a school, and change the official residential address back to the original address after the child has been successfully enrolled. Migrants and less educated families are less likely to game the system.
A survey among 1,300 parents of first-graders suggests that this negatively affects parents and children who are sincere.