Much Ado about Nothing? The Role of Primary School Catchment Areas For Ethnic School Segregation: Evidence From a Policy Reform

By the 2008/09 school year the federal state of North Rhine‐Westphalia (Germany) abolished binding school catchment areas in all municipalities. The reform has been controversial and it was feared that school choice would increase ethnic segregation. Using data on all primary schools we contribute to this debate by analyzing ethnic segregation before and after the reform. We discuss drawbacks of commonly used segregation indices and their interpretation as well as causality issues. Although there is an increase in segregation over the time period studied, our results show that segregation has not been affected by the policy reform.     

Non-public competition and public school performance: evidence from West Virginia

In this study, we investigate whether non-public school enrolment affects the performance of public school districts. If homeschooling and private schools act as competition, public school districts test scores should be positively associated with non-public enrolment. Using data on West Virginia county school districts, and controlling for endogeneity with an instrumental variables approach, we find that a one standard deviation increase in relative non-public enrolment in a county is associated with statistically significant improvements in public school district test scores. Our findings thus confirm that non-public enrolment and the competition it provides act to improve, rather than impede, public school performance.     

Residential segregation and educational attainment of children from regional migrant families in China

This paper studies the residential segregation effects on educational attainment of children from regional migrant families in China. We find that if migrant families live in segregated communities with fewer local residents, the school dropout rate of the children living with their parents in the host cities is higher and their high school enrollment rate is lower. We employ a unique set of nationwide survey data of regional migrants in China in 2012 and 2013 that comprises more than 150,000 individuals in each year. We first use the ratio of migrants over the total population residing in a community to measure segregation. When the ratio increases by 10%, the school dropout rate of migrant children increases by 4.7% from the mean value. Secondly, we identify segregation from the housing type of the migrant family. When they reside in the dorms provided by their employers or in the workplace, they will also be surrounded by many migrant colleagues. We find that living in such places increases the “not‐going‐to‐high‐school rate” of migrant children by 35% from the mean value. Our subsample analysis indicates that the segregation effects only exist in the samples of male migrant children and rural hukou families.     

Racial segregation and the black–white test score gap

Racial segregation is often blamed for some of the achievement gap between blacks and whites. We study the effects of school and neighborhood segregation on the relative SAT scores of black students across different metropolitan areas, using large microdata samples for the 1998–2001 test cohorts. Our models include detailed controls for the family background of individual test-takers, school-level controls for selective participation in the test, and city-level controls for racial composition, income, and region. We find robust evidence that the black–white test score gap is higher in more segregated cities. Holding constant family background and other factors, a shift from a highly segregated city to a nearly integrated city closes about one-quarter of the raw black–white gap in SAT scores. Specifications that distinguish between school and neighborhood segregation suggest that neighborhood segregation has a consistently negative impact while school segregation has no independent effect, though we cannot reject equality of the two effects. Additional tests indicate that much of the effect of neighborhood segregation operates through neighbors' incomes, not through race per se. Data on enrollment in honors courses suggest that within-school segregation increases when schools are more highly integrated, potentially offsetting the benefits of school desegregation and accounting for our findings.     

School Choice and Segregation: Evidence from an Admission Reform*

We evaluate the effects of school choice on segregation using data from an admission reform in the Stockholm upper secondary schools. Before 2000, the students were assigned to their nearest school, but from the fall of 2000, the students can apply to any school within Stockholm and admission decisions are solely based on grades. As expected, the new admission policy increased segregation by ability. However, segregation by family background, and especially segregation between immigrants and natives, also increased significantly. The increase in segregation by family background can be explained by ability sorting, but the increase in ethnic segregation can not.     

Efficiency and Equity in School Funding: A Case Study for Kansas

This study measures cost inefficiency of Kansas public school districts and applied both mathematical programming and stochastic frontier approach. The empirical study uses two-stage data envelopment analysis model and the cost inefficiency effects model proposed by Battese and Coelli (Empirical Economics 24:325–332, 1995) and applied to a panel data. The results found mean inefficiencies from these two models are very close. The results indicate that Kansas school districts, on average, exhibit cost inefficiency in their operations, however, there is a tendency for inefficiencies to decline over time. The study does not find any strong evidence for lower efficiency due to lower expenditure per-pupil. Instead, we found inconclusive evidences where lower efficiency for certain school districts could be assigned to unfavorable environmental cost conditions.

ASSESSING THE EFFICIENCY OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS USING DATA ENVELOPMENT ANALYSIS AND FRONTIER REGRESSION

The cost efficiency of 520 New York school districts is measured using data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier regression. Mean inefficiency is 14% using either method, and the rank order correlation coefficient of inefficiency between the two methods is 86. The three largest school districts (Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse) are among the most efficient. Student test scores are output variables, and socioeconomic control variables are included to adjust for the harshness of the educational environment in which districts operate. (JEL C29, C61, 121)     

GROWTH AND VARIABILITY OF SCHOOL DISTRICT INCOME TAX REVENUES: IS TAX BASE DIVERSIFICATION A GOOD IDEA FOR SCHOOL FINANCING?

School districts in Ohio have the option of diversifying their revenue base by adopting income taxes. Using a panel of Ohio school districts that adopted a local income tax from 1990 to 2008, we find that revenues are procyclical and fluctuate only mildly. The estimated short‐ and long‐run income elasticity of school district income tax revenues is 1.05 and 1.04, respectively. We also find that the school district tax base fully adjusts to its long‐run equilibrium within 2 years. Finally, we show that school district income tax adoption does not provide more stability to total school district tax revenues in the short or the long run. (JEL H71, H75)     

Inefficient Education Spending in Public School Districts: A Case for Consolidation?

This article estimates scale economies for Arkansas school districts. Large economies of scale exist in teacher salary and supply costs, as well as total costs. The results suggest that districts, especially rural districts, would experience measurable cost savings from consolidation. The authors simulate a hypothetical rural school district consolidation to obtain cost-saving estimates from consolidation. Simulations indicate that districts could save an average of 34% in average variable costs. At the state level, consolidation of rural districts in Arkansas could annually save $40 million. However, consolidation of school districts may increase various implicit costs to students and local communities. (JEL I22 , I28 )     

Sorting,peers, and achievement of Aboriginal students in British Columbia

Abstract We examine the contribution of differences in school environments to the gap in education outcomes between Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal students. We find both substantial school‐level segregation of Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal students and a substantial gap in test scores. Conventional achievement gap decompositions attribute roughly half of the grade 7 test score gap to between‐school differences and half to within‐school differences. The segregation of Aboriginal students suggests that peer effects might explain some of these between‐school achievement differences. However, we find that peer effects associated with a greater proportion of Aboriginal peers, if anything, improve value‐added exam outcomes of Aboriginal students.     

Reputation, group structure and social tensions

Social tensions impede social cohesion and public goods provision, and can be a driving force for more serious conflicts such as civil wars. Surprisingly, the emergence of social tensions has been studied only rarely in the literature. In the present contribution a game-theoretic model highlights how reputation concerns and the structure of group cleavages matter for the emergence of social tensions. In particular, the respective effects of ethnic fractionalization, polarization and segregation are analyzed. The differences between ethnicity and class, and the role of social mobility are also studied. The predictions of the model can account for recent empirical evidence.     

Local Segregation and Well‐Being

This paper deals with the quantification of the well‐being loss/gain of a demographic group associated with its occupational segregation, an issue that has not been formally tackled in the literature. For this purpose, this paper proposes several properties to take into account when measuring this phenomenon. Building on standard assumptions of social welfare functions, it also defines and characterizes a parameterized family of indices that satisfy those properties. In particular, the indices are equal to zero when either the group has no segregation or all occupations have the same wage, and the indices increase when individuals of the group move into occupations that have higher wages than those left behind. In addition, ceteris paribus, the indices increase more the lower the wage is of the occupation left behind, and consider small improvements for many people to be more important than large improvements for a few.     

On two kinds of manipulation for school choice problems

Many school districts in the US. employ centralized clearing houses to assign students to public schools. An important potential threat against any school choice mechanism is the tendency of schools to circumvent the procedure via two kinds of strategic manipulation: manipulation via capacities and manipulation via pre-arranged matches. This paper studies the extent of the vulnerability of three prominent school choice mechanisms that have been adopted (or, considered for adoption) by some school districts in the US. We find that the highly debated Boston mechanism as well as the top trading cycles mechanism are immune to manipulation via capacities, unlike the student-optimal stable mechanism (SOSM). We show that SOSM is immune to manipulation via capacities if and only if the priority structure satisfies an acyclicity condition proposed by Ergin (Econometrica 70:2489?C2497, 2002). On the other hand, we show that essentially no mechanism is immune to manipulation via pre-arranged matches.     

The three Is of public schools: irrelevant inputs,insufficient resources and inefficiency

We examine the educational production function and efficiency of public school districts in Illinois. Using non-parametric kernel methods, we find that most traditional schooling inputs are irrelevant in determining test scores (even in a very general setting). Property tax caps are the only relevant factor that is related to districts’ financial constraints and have predominantly negative associations with test scores. Therefore, insufficient resources may be partially responsible for the lack of growth in test scores. For most other relevant inputs, we find substantial heterogeneity in the returns, which helps reconcile some of the puzzling results in the literature. We further find that there exist inefficiencies in school districts. Moreover, the level of test scores, commonly used as a measure of school effectiveness, (while related) differs substantially from our efficiency scores, and standard parametric approaches drastically underestimate school efficiency. We discuss the policy implications of our results.     

Are historic districts a backdoor for segregation? Yes and no

We study how historic district programs impact residential segregation in Denver. We find that homebuyers are more likely to be White within historic districts, but official historic designation has no effect on this probability. More specifically, we calculate that the predicted probability of having a White homebuyer increases from 77 to over 80 percent when the home is located within a historic district. Similarly, we find that most transactions flow from White sellers to White buyers, regardless of official designation. Thus, while historic districts tend to be more segregated, official designation does not seem to amplify this existing problem.     

Oil price and Gulf Corporation Council stock indices: New evidence from time-varying copula models

Using a time-varying GJR copula approach, we determine the conditional dependence of the GCC stock indices on oil price between 2007 and 2016. We show how to improve the forecasting accuracy of the co-movement of energy and stock prices in an equally weighted portfolio. Contrary to prior findings, we demonstrate that due to the different co-movements across the GCC stock indices, portfolios of oil assets and several GCC stocks are less likely to be affected by systemic risk. The different co-movements across several stock indices over time provide different entry and exit points for stock investors. This approach is in line with the ‘buy low/sell high’ adage.     

Polarization Orderings and New Classes of Polarization Indices

This paper explores equivalent formulations of the polarization ordering first proposed by Foster and Wolfson. Motivated by the class of polarization indices proposed by Foster and Wolfson, we have developed a class of generalized Foster-Wolfson indices. In addition, a new class of polarization indices satisfying a set of desirable axioms is also derived.     

Food for thought: the effects of school accountability plans on school nutrition

With the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, school accountability is now federal law, continuing the recent trend of states implementing significant accountability systems for schools. This paper studies an unusual yet powerful school response to accountability systems. Using disaggregated school lunch menus from a random sample of school districts in Virginia, we find that schools threatened with accountability sanctions increase the caloric content of their lunches on testing days in an apparent attempt to boost short-term student cognitive performance. Moreover, we find that the schools that responded the most along these dimensions experienced the greatest improvements in standardized test scores.     

Armed conflicts and women's authority in intra-household decision making

This paper evaluates the extent to which armed conflicts alter women's intra-household decision making in 51 countries over the past three decades (1990–2018). Exploiting the variations both within and across districts in the timing of battles, we uncover adverse consequences of armed conflict on women's engagement in household decisions on both financial and non-financial aspects. Specifically, a one standard deviation increase in the number of battles (equivalent to an increase of 5.1 battles) reduces the composite financial and non-financial decision indices of women by 2.32% and 1.34% relative to the sample averages. Breaking down the decision-making indices by looking at the underlying items, we further find that the declines in women's intra-household decision making come from reductions in all aspects of financial and non-financial domains.     

Examining Federal Impact Aid's Reimbursement for Local School Districts

In 1950, Congress created the Federal Impact Aid Program to compensate local school districts for lost tax revenue or increased burdens resulting from federal activities, including the placement of military bases within school districts. Currently, Impact Aid provides nearly $1 billion per year in subsidies to approximately 1400 local school districts that enroll over 1.2 million eligible children. This current study examines the adequacy of the funding in the Impact Aid program as an example of how the existing public finance literature provides the tools to help policy makers make informed decisions. (JEL H0 , H7 , 12 )