  A growing number of central authorities use assignment mechanisms to allocate
students to schools in a way that reflects student preferences and school
priorities. However, most real-world mechanisms incentivize students to
strategically misreport their preferences. In this paper, we provide an
approach for identifying the causal effects of school assignment on future
outcomes that accounts for strategic misreporting. Misreporting may invalidate
existing point-identification approaches, and we derive sharp bounds for causal
effects that are robust to strategic behavior. Our approach applies to any
mechanism as long as there exist placement scores and cutoffs that characterize
that mechanism's allocation rule. We use data from a deferred acceptance
mechanism that assigns students to more than 1,000 university-major
combinations in Chile. Matching theory predicts that students' behavior in
Chile should be strategic because they can list only up to eight options, and
we find empirical evidence consistent with such behavior. Our bounds are
informative enough to reveal significant heterogeneity in graduation success
with respect to preferences and school assignment.
