School choice, universal vouchers and native flight out of local public schools

Using data from Copenhagen school registers and other sources, I test the hypothesis that Danes are more likely to opt out of their assigned public schools when these have larger concentrations of immigrant students. The results suggest that up to an immigrant concentration of around 25-35 percent in the assigned school, opting out decisions of Danes are not affected when a rich set of covariates at student, school and neighbourhood levels is controlled for. Yet, for concentrations exceeding 25-35 percent, the share of immigrants in the local school is strongly related to opting out. Additional results show that only a minor part of the immigrant population (the 20 percent speaking Danish at home) is responding to variations in the school composition and the response is much weaker than for Danes and primarily related to the percentage of low-SES students in the school. These results combined lend support to the native flight from immigrants hypothesis and suggest that ethnic segregation across schools is increased by Danes' and immigrants' differential behaviour.