Equal opportunities in school choice settings

We introduce a novel notion of fairness, inspired by the equality of opportunity literature, into the school choice setting, endowed with a measure of the match qualities between students and schools. In this framework, fairness considerations are made by a social evaluator based on the match quality distribution. We impose the standard notion of stability as a minimal desideratum and study matchings that satisfy our notion of fairness and an efficiency requirement based on aggregate match quality. To overcome some of the identified incompatibilities, we relax the fairness and efficiency definitions, and embed them in a family of linear social welfare functions. We then propose an algorithm that maximize social welfare over the set of stable matchings. Finally, we illustrate our approach with an application to the allocation of Italian high school students in the 2021/2022 academic year. JEL: C78, D63