Abstract: A growing body of research has shown that increasing freedom of school choice may lead to higher socioeconomic school segregation. However, the evaluation of related educational policies requires a deeper understanding of the channels through which parental choices impact on socioeconomic school segregation, and a measure of the contribution of each of those channels. I look at rank-
ordered Pre-Kindergarten preferences of high socioeconomic status (SES) and low-SES parents to explore this interrogation. Through the simulation of multiple counterfactual scenarios regarding school applications and the school admission process, I quantify the contribution of social, spatial, and economic frictions to socioeconomic school segregation in Chile. While removing social frictions leads
to a significant decrease in socioeconomic school segregation, removing spatial frictions does not. Finally, removing economic frictions to all types of students leads to a significant increase in the levels of segregation due to highly congested school applications and heterogeneous preferences of high-SES and low-SESparents concerning school attributes.