CHARTER SCHOOL COMPETITION AND ITS IMPACT ON EMPLOYMENT SPENDING IN MICHIGAN'S PUBLIC SCHOOLS

This paper seeks to determine how competition from charter schools affects a broad range of employees including instructors, administrators, and support personnel. Three empirical models are estimated utilizing a panel data from Michigan: a fixed effect model, a fixed effect model with lagged dependent variable, and an instrumental variable model. The key findings are that when a school district faces competition from charter schools they spend a larger percentage on instructors (most likely most of this is going toward teachers and not teacher aides), while spending a smaller percentage on employees that support instructors. The models seem to imply that the increased spending on teachers may not be reflected in a salary increase. (JEL H52, H75, I21, I22)     

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.     

Do schools compete with each other? Empirical evidence from Jakarta,Indonesia

This 2015 cross-sectional study tested whether the level of competition affected the national test scores of senior high schools in Jakarta. We measured the level of competition using the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) and a gravity-based school competition index for the number of enrolled students. We found that schools’ national exam scores were positively associated with the level of competition. Furthermore, this competition was better explained by physical proximity than by administrative boundaries. However, public schools did not benefit from the competition.     

学校类型与流动儿童的教育-来自上海的经验证据

本文根据在上海地区进行的问卷调查和标准化考试结果,考察学校类型对于流动儿童考试成绩的影响。我们在控制家庭和学生个人因素,并通过工具变量法调整学校选择的内生性问题后,发现在民工子弟学校就读和在公办学校就读的流动儿童之间仍存在较大的成绩差距。进一步的分位数回归结果显示学校类型对于成绩较差的学生影响更大。我们的研究结果与目前民工子弟学校教学质量普遍低于公办学校的观察相吻合。     

When do better schools raise housing prices? Evidence from Paris public and private schools

In this paper, we investigate how housing prices react to the quality of education offered by neighboring public and private schools. The organization of secondary schooling in the city of Paris, which combines residence-based assignment to public schools with a well-developed and almost entirely publicly funded private school system, offers a valuable empirical context for analyzing how private schools affect the capitalization of public school performance in housing prices. Using comprehensive data on both schools and real estate transactions over the period 1997–2004, we develop a matching framework to carefully compare sales across school attendance boundaries. We find that a standard deviation increase in public school performance raises housing prices by 1.4 to 2.4%. Moreover, we show that the capitalization of public school performance in the price of real estate shrinks as the availability of private schools increases in the neighborhood. Our results confirm the predictions of general equilibrium models of school choice that private schools, by providing an advantageous outside option to parents, tend to mitigate the impact of public school performance on housing prices.     

Competition between private and public schools: testing stratification and pricing predictions

When there are peer effects in education, private schools have an incentive to vary tuition to attract relatively able students. Epple and Romano [American Economic Review 88(1) (1998) 33] develop a general equilibrium model characterizing equilibrium pricing and student selection into schools when peer effects are present. The model predicts that competition will lead private schools to give tuition discounts to more able students, and that this will give rise to an equilibrium exhibiting stratification by income and ability between the public and private sectors and to a hierarchy of schools within the private sector. The model also yields a variety of comparative-static predictions. The predictions of the model are tested in this paper using a unique data set assembled by Figlio and Stone [Research in Labor Economics (1999) 115]. Tests of equilibrium predictions of the model reveal that: The propensity to attend private school increases with both income and ability, and, among private schools, the propensity to attend the highest-tuition schools rises with both income and ability. Within private schools, tuition declines with student ability, with a substantial number of even high-income households paying little or no tuition. The correlation between income and ability is greater in public than private schools. Tests of comparative static predictions of the model reveal that: Both income and ability become stronger predictors of private school attendance as public school expenditure falls. Income becomes increasingly important in determining placement in the private school hierarchy as public school expenditure falls. Discounts to ability in the lowest-quality private school decline as public school expenditure rises while discounts to ability in the highest-quality private school are little affected by changes in public school expenditure. Expenditure in private schools rises as expenditure in public schools increases. These empirical results are consistent with the predictions of the theoretical model.     

Strategic quality choice and charter schools

Proponents of Charter schools argue that competition will improve the educational outcomes of both Charter and public students. A model of quality choice has been used to examine this claim. With capacity constraints, there is an equilibrium in which the Charter school offers a higher quality which the public school will not match. Competition from Charter schools may therefore have only modest effects on public school quality, if any.     

Private or public school advantage? Evidence from 40 countries using PISA 2012-Mathematics

It is known that in most countries, private school students outperform students in public schools in international assessments. However, the empirical literature recognizes that assessing the true effect of private school attendance requires addressing selection and sorting issues on both observabland unobservables. The existing empirical evidence on the private school effect mostly covers OECD and Latin American countries, with little evidence on other parts of the world. There is recent emerging country-specific evidence doubting the existence of a private school advantage. I use PISA 2012 data for Mathematics and two different methodologies to derive baseline and bias-corrected estimates of the private-dependent and independent school effect for 40 countries. A robust private school advantage is found only in a handful of countries. Public schools generally perform as well as private subsidized schools and outperform independent schools. Accounting for both peer effects and selection is necessary when evaluating school effectiveness, especially in the case of independent schools.     

COMPETITION IN PUBLIC SCHOOL DISTRICTS: CHARTER SCHOOL ENTRY,STUDENT SORTING,AND SCHOOL INPUT DETERMINATION

This article develops and estimates an equilibrium model of charter school entry, school input choices, and student school choices. The structural model renders a comprehensive and internally consistent picture of treatment effects when there may be general equilibrium effects of school competition. Simulations indicate that the mean effect of charter schools on attendant students is positive and varies widely across locations. The mean spillover effect on public school students is small but positive. Lifting caps on charter schools would more than double entry but reduce gains for attendant students.     

The effect of primary school type on the high school opportunities of migrant children in China

Using longitudinal data collected from China, this paper studies how primary school type affects migrant children’s high school opportunities. We use parental residence prior to a policy change in Shanghai as an instrument for primary school type, and find that migrant children who attended private primary schools are 10% less likely to enter high schools without retention than their counterparts who attended public primary schools. We show that both institutional barriers and learning at the primary school stage affect students’ probability of entering high school and whether they go to regular or vocational high schools.     

School finance reform and voluntary fiscal federalism

California has transferred the financing of its public schools from localities to the state. In response, many families have supplemented the tax revenue of their local public schools with voluntary contributions. This paper analyzes that phenomenon. We propose a model of partial cooperation among parents in making voluntary contributions to their public schools. Under reasonable conditions, the model predicts that contributions per pupil should decline with school size. We estimate this relationship using data on contributions to California schools. Our estimates reveal that contributions per pupil do decline with size; however, the rate of decline is surprisingly slow.     

INTEGRATION AND UTILIZATION OF PUBLIC EDUCATION RESOURCES IN REMOTE AND HOMOGENOUS AREAS: A CASE STUDY OF THE UPPER PENINSULA OF MICHIGAN

This article adopts the nonradial Russell measure in the context of data envelopment analysis to measure the relative efficiency of public education in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, a geographically remote but homogenous region. The empirical analysis focuses on the effect of community characteristics on the schools efficiency by using school district–level data. Several different forms of model specifications in the stage of data envelopment analysis are executed to check the robustness of the findings by adopting extreme-bound analysis and thick modeling approach. Interestingly, despite the homogeneity of the Upper Peninsula, wide differences in the efficiency of education are found. These differences are robust as to model specification, suggesting that efficiency studies might be a useful guide for policy makers. Community factors such as income and educational levels, obtained from the census data by school district, are introduced in the second stage because they will influence the efficiency of the schools and the technology by which schools help students learn. Median family income is the most important explanatory variable, whereas the median value of housing is insignificant. In addition, private school enrollments are unrelated to the efficiency of public education, contrary to what many advocates of private schools have contended. These findings help understand education efficiency, having policy implications for education-oriented states such as Michigan. (JEL I2 , N3 , H52 )     

School Finance Induced Migration and Stratification Patterns: The Impact of Private School Vouchers

This paper introduces a general equilibrium model of public school finance that includes: (i) multiple school districts that finance local public schools via property taxes set by majority vote; (ii) multiple neighborhoods within school districts where each neighborhood is characterized by a quality level of housing; (iii) local public schools that are obligated to admit all interested students who reside within the school district; (iv) private schools that function as clubs of parents who share the cost of the private school equally and who can choose to exclude others; (v) an educational production process that depends on both per pupil spending and average peer quality within the school; and (vi) individual peer quality levels that are correlated with the socioeconomic status of households. Since it allows for various degrees of imperfect stratification of residents across communities, the model is well suited for investigating empirically relevant migration forces induced by school finance reform proposals. The abstract model itself, however, is too complex to yield many analytic results. A computational counterpart to the model isnb therefore developed, calibrated to data, and utilized for policy experiments. In particular, the impact of vouchers in the context of different types of prevoucher educational finance systems is investigated, and it is found that migration patterns in general would cause vouchers to benefit public schools in poor communities while hurting public schools in wealthy communities.     

WHY DO CHARTER SCHOOLS FAIL? AN ANALYSIS OF CHARTER SCHOOL SURVIVAL IN NEW JERSEY

Charter school competition can only work as a policy to improve public education if schools that do not contribute to this goal are allowed to fail. We estimate survival regressions to assess the effects of various factors on the probability of school failure. We find that students' test scores are the most important determinant of survival: a one standard deviation increase reduces the probability of failure by 76%. Higher expenditures per student and a longer wait list result in smaller, but significant, reductions. Enrollment, average performance in the host district, and student demographics do not significantly affect school survival. (JEL I21, H75)     

SCHOOL CHOICE AND STUDENT SORTING: EVIDENCE FROM ADACHI WARD IN JAPAN*

We examine whether the school choice programme of public junior high schools in Adachi ward has caused student sorting and has thus increased the differences in scores between the schools. We find that students are sorted in the sense that the students living in the school attendance areas where there is a higher proportion of high‐status occupations are more likely to select private schools even after the introduction of the school choice programme, or they select public schools with higher scores. Adachi's average scores relative to the Tokyo average have improved, while the between school differences in scores have not expanded.     

Institutions,quality competition and public service provision: The case of public education

This paper contributes to the literature on integovernmental competition in two ways. First, the institutional setting within which public services are delivered is analyzed with respect to the impact on the quality of services provided. Previous studies have measured competition only in terms of governmental structure, ignoring the issue of service quality and the potential for differentiating local governmental jurisdictions along quality dimensions. Second, the outcome of competition is defined in terms of service quality. Previous studies generally have measured the outcome of competition by examining the fiscal effects of fragmentation and accountability through service costs or tax revenue impacts. School districts were used to empirically test quality competition. Student academic performance was modeled as a function of control variables and the degree of competition from neighboring school districts. Academic performance in public schools was positively associated with the performance of neighboring districts, although the effect was small. These findings, however, suggest that strategies to strengthen interjurisdictional competition may be useful in enhancing public service quality.     

The Headmaster Ritual: The Importance of Management for School Outcomes

We estimate the impact of individual principals on school outcomes by using panel data that allow us to track principals over time. We find that individual principals have a substantive impact on school policies, working conditions, and student outcomes. In particular, students who attend a school that has a one standard deviation better principal improve their achievement by between 0.05 and 0.1 standard deviations. Despite rich background information on principals, it is difficult to characterize successful management, suggesting that innate skills are central. We find that the scope for discretion is larger among voucher schools and in areas with school competition.     

EDUCATIONAL VOUCHERS AND CREAM SKIMMING*

Epple and Romano (1998) show equilibrium provision of education by public and private schools has the latter skim off the wealthiest and most‐able students, and universal vouchers lead to further cream skimming. Here we study voucher design that injects private‐school competition and increases technical efficiencies without cream skimming. Conditioning vouchers on student ability without restriction on participating schools' policies fails to affect significantly cream skimming. However, by adding restrictions like tuition constraints, such vouchers can reap the benefits of school competition without increased stratification. This is accomplished while allowing voluntary participation in the voucher system and without tax increases.     

The demand for primary schooling in Madagascar: Price,quality, and the choice between public and private providers

We estimate a discrete choice model of primary schooling and simulate policy alternatives for rural Madagascar. Among school quality factors, the results highlight the negative impacts on schooling demand of poor facility quality and the use of multigrade teaching (several grades being taught simultaneously by one teacher) in public schools. Simulations indicate the feasibility of reducing multigrade in public schools by adding teachers and classrooms, a policy that would lead to modest improvements in overall enrollments and would disproportionately benefit poor children. Given much higher price elasticities for poorer households, raising school fees to cover some of the additional costs would strongly counteract these favorable distributional outcomes. An alternative policy of consolidation of primary schools combined with multigrade reduction or other quality improvements is likely to be ineffective because of the strongly negative impact of distance to school.     

The politics of experimentation: Political competition and randomized controlled trials

This paper provides an analysis of how political factors affect the incidence of the evaluation of public policies, with a focus on Randomized Control Trial (RCT) experiments in international development. We argue that political environments where incumbents face greater electoral competition and smaller ruling margins are more likely to host RCT experiments. Using various data sources for the incidence of RCTs both at the cross-country level and at the sub-national level in India, we find that RCTs are more likely to occur in politically competitive jurisdictions. We employ fixed effects regressions using various estimators and an instrumental variable strategy that exploits an electoral reform in India which limited the entry of independent candidates and exogenously affected the degree of electoral competition in state-level politics. The effect seems concentrated on RCTs that have the government as a partner, suggesting that political competition has an important demand-side effect on the incidence of RCTs.