school choice programs and location choices of private schools this paper studies how the school choice policies that subsidize private school attendance using public funds affect the spatial distribution of private schools in the united states private school choice programs enacted between 1997 and 2010 are examined and linked to private school provision 2 years later the paper finds that school choice policies lead to more private schools where the input to public schools is lower and the pool of students with special needs is larger yet the introduction of means tested school choice programs does not necessarily lead private schools to locate in low income neighborhoods jel i2 h4 r3

data watch research data in the economics of education economists have developed a wide variety of policy relevant empirical research projects that address the role of education in promoting individual and social welfare recent examples include studies on the impact of school spending on educational outputs the differences between public and private schools the effects of competition among schools the determinants of teacher quality the impact of unions on schools and the consequences of education finance reform one reason for the proliferation of such empirical studies has been the emergence of high quality micro level data on education in this paper we discuss three broad types of data sets data on educational institutions data on educational outcomes at the individual level and data sets from school reforms and experiments in each section we summarize some of the leading surveys discuss the general availability of the data and identify some but certainly not all of the research that has utilized these data this review is by no means exhaustive we have restricted our attention to analyses of data sets describing primary and secondary education moreover we emphasize data sets that are excellent sources of information but are less wellknown and utilized by economists in particular two obvious omissions from this review are the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy and the panel study of income dynamics psid both are broad based studies that track people over periods of time gathering information both on educational attainment and on many other issues as well

measuring the incentives to learn in colombia using new quantile regression approaches abstract this paper employs newly developed quantile regression techniques to investigate a policy that could differentially affect students performance the colombian vouchers were assigned using lotteries and were renewable as long as the students maintained satisfactory academic progress this second aspect of the program may provide incentives for low attainment students to work harder the evidence supports the hypothesis that incentives could account for the impact of the vouchers including lower repetition rate the effect of the vouchers is largest in the lower tail of the educational attainment distribution a possibility that was conjectured by others but has not yet been confirmed empirically the evidence suggests that the incentive effect of the program increases weak students test scores by at least 0 1 standard deviations roughly the score gain associated to a half year of school learning

information school choice and academic achievement evidence from two experiments we examine a natural experiment and a field experiment that provided direct information on school test scores to lower income families in a public school choice plan receiving information significantly increases the fraction of parents choosing higher performing schools parents with high scoring alternatives nearby were more likely to choose nonguaranteed schools with higher test scores using random variation from each experiment we find that attending a higher scoring school increases student test scores the results imply that school choice will most effectively increase academic achievement for disadvantaged students when parents have easy access to test score information and good options from which to choose

the glass of milk subsidy program and malnutrition in peru this study of the vaso de leche glass of milk feeding program in peru looks for evidence that this in kind transfer program aimed at young children furthers nutritional objectives the study links public expenditure data with household survey data to substantiate the targeting and to model the determinants of nutritional outcomes it confirms that the social transfer program targets poor households and households with low nutritional status nevertheless the study fails to find econometric evidence that the nutritional objectives are being achieved

effects of free choice among public schools in this paper i investigate the impact of a programme in tel aviv israel that terminated an existing inter district busing integration programme and allowed students free choice among public schools the identification is based on difference in differences and regression discontinuity designs that yield various alternative comparison groups drawn from untreated tangent neighbourhoods and adjacent cities across identification methods and comparison groups the results consistently suggest that choice significantly reduces the drop out rate and increases the cognitive achievements of high school students it also improves behavioural outcomes such as teacher student relationships and students social acclimation and satisfaction at school and reduces the level of violence and classroom disruption

school choice school quality and postsecondary attainment we study the impact of a public school choice lottery in charlotte mecklenburg schools on college enrollment and degree completion we find a significant overall increase in college attainment among lottery winners who attend their first choice school using rich administrative data on peers teachers course offerings and other inputs we show that the impacts of choice are strongly predicted by gains on several measures of school quality gains in attainment are concentrated among girls girls respond to attending a better school with higher grades and increases in college preparatory course taking while boys do not

american education research changes tack for a quarter century american education researchers have tended to favour qualitative and descriptive analyses over quantitative studies using random assignment or featuring credible quasi experimental research designs this has now changed in 2002 and 2003 the us department of education funded a dozen randomized trials to evaluate the efficacy of pre school programmes up from one in 2000 in this essay i explore the intellectual and legislative roots of this change beginning with the story of how contemporary education research fell out of step with other social sciences i then use a study in which low achieving high school students were randomly offered incentives to learn to show how recent developments in research methods answer ethical and practical objections to the use of random assignment for research on schools finally i offer a few cautionary notes based on results from the recent effort to cut class size in california copyright 2004 oxford university press

how vouchers could change the market for education small probability that vouchers will in the foreseeable future be adopted on a large scale in any school district or state at the moment only three states have adopted publicly funded voucher programs and all of these programs are limited in scale nonetheless in recent years over 40 state legislatures have considered proposals to provide some type of voucher program or tuition tax credit for at least some families in a given state or school district and the children s scholarship fund see http www scholarshipfund org has helped create or expand privately funded voucher programs in numerous cities as vouchers become a more significant part of education policy debates the time is right to consider what we know and do not know about the likely effects of adopting various voucher schemes in the balance of this paper i describe both empirical and theoretical work on education that speaks to this topic i argue that we cannot confidently predict the outcomes that would result from various voucher schemes and i also stress that debates over vouchers per se are not informative details concerning funding targeting and discretion in the use of vouchers should greatly affect the outcomes associated with any particular voucher program still empirical evidence on the performance of public versus private schools as well as numerical results from existing simulation models suggest that policymakers should be able to design voucher programs that would be helpful to minority students in large cities public schools in large cities often perform poorly in minority neighborhoods and this is especially true in economically disadvantaged areas

public spending on education and the incentives for student achievement we build a model where homogeneous workers can accumulate human capital by investing in education schools combine public resources and individual effort to generate productive skills if skills are imperfectly compensated then in equilibrium students may under invest in effort we examine the effect on human capital accumulation of three basic education finance policies increased tuition subsidies may not be beneficial because they increase enrolment but they may lower the incentives for student achievement hence the skill level policies directed at enhancing the productivity of education or making degrees more informative are more successful at improving educational outcomes

equity and educational performance in this paper we review the main issues under discussion in the field of economics of education with a special focus on latin america we seek to organize the debate about educational policies by showing how these policies respond to different models based on different assumptions and hypotheses about how the educational system functions methodological and informational problems make it difficult to test the validity of different policies this would explain the enormous number of studies in the field that conclude with conflicting policy prescriptions we also use data from chile to analyze the importance of the school in educational outcome and to explore the heterogeneous impacts of student and school characteristics on educational achievement the results obtained allow us to conclude that the school plays a very important role in explaining educational achievement we also find that low income students stand to benefit the most from attending a private school however this conclusion is valid for a marginal analysis and does not necessarily apply to a massive reallocation of students among schools

evaluating education programs that have lotteried admission and selective attrition we study the effectiveness of magnet programs in an urban district that ration excess demand by admission lotteries differential attrition arises since students who lose the lottery are more likely to pursue options outside the school district than students who win the lottery when students leave the district important outcome variables are often not observed the treatment effects are not point identified we exploit known quantiles of the outcome distribution to construct informative bounds on treatment effects we find that magnet programs improve behavioral outcomes but have no significant effect on achievement

the effect of randomized school admissions on voter participation there is little causal evidence on the effect of economic and policy outcomes on voting behavior this paper uses randomized outcomes from a school choice lottery to examine if lottery outcomes affect voting behavior in a school board election we show that losing the lottery has no significant impact on overall voting behavior however among white families those with above median income and prior voting history lottery losers were significantly more likely to vote than lottery winners using propensity score methods we compare the voting of lottery participants to similar families who did not participate in the lottery we find that losing the school choice lottery caused an increase in voter turnout among whites while winning the lottery had no effect relative to non participants overall our empirical results lend support to models of expressive and retrospective voting where likely voters are motivated to vote by past negative policy outcomes

the effect of school choice on participants evidence from randomized lotteries school choice has become an increasingly prominent strategy for enhancing academic achievement to evaluate the impact on participants we exploit randomized lotteries that determine high school admission in the chicago public schools compared to those students who lose lotteries students who win attend high schools that are better in a number of dimensions including peer achievement and attainment levels nonetheless we find little evidence that winning a lottery provides any systematic benefit across a wide variety of traditional academic measures lottery winners do however experience improvements on a subset of nontraditional outcome measures such as self reported disciplinary incidents and arrest rates

who benefits when the government pays more pass through in the medicare advantage program abstract governments contract with private firms to provide a wide range of services while a large body of previous work has estimated the effects of that contracting surprisingly little has investigated how those effects vary with the generosity of the contract in this paper we examine this issue in the medicare advantage ma program through which the federal government contracts with private insurers to coordinate and finance health care for 17 million medicare recipients to do this we exploit a substantial policy induced increase in ma reimbursement in metropolitan areas with a population of 250 000 or more relative to msas below this threshold our results demonstrate that the additional reimbursement leads more private firms to enter this market and to an increase in the share of medicare recipients enrolled in ma plans our findings also reveal that about one eighth of the additional reimbursement is passed through to consumers in the form of better coverage a somewhat larger share accrues to private insurers in the form of higher profits and we find suggestive evidence of a large impact on advertising expenditures our results have implications for a key feature of the affordable care act that will reduce reimbursement to ma plans by 156 billion from 2013 to 2022

good principals or good peers parental valuation of school characteristics tiebout equilibrium and the incentive effects of competition among jurisdictions good principals or good peers parental valuation of school characteristics tiebout equilibrium and the incentive effects of competition among jurisdictions by j esse m r othstein school choice policies may by aligning admin istrators incentives with parental demand yield improved efficiency in educational production milton friedman 1962 john e chubb and terry m moe 1990 but eric a hanushek 1981 cautions if the efficiency of our school systems is due to poor incentives for teachers and admin istrators coupled with poor decision making by consumers it would be unwise to expect much from programs that seek to strengthen market forces in the selection of schools p 35 empha sis added poor decision making is not required parents may rationally choose schools with pleasant surroundings athletic facilities cultural advantages ibid p 34 over those that most efficiently pursue academic performance they may prefer poorly run schools with good peer groups over those that are more effective but en roll worse students j douglas willms and frank h echols 1992 1993 or they may simply be unable to identify effective schools thomas j kane and douglas o staiger 2002 any factor that leads parents to choose any but the most effective available schools will tend to dilute the incentives for efficient management that choice might otherwise create this study examines the distribution of stu dent outcomes across schools within metropol itan housing markets for evidence on parental demand economists have long noted that par ents choices among residential locations are potentially informative about how more com plete choice systems may operate charles m tiebout 1956 melvin v borland and roy m howsen 1992 caroline m hoxby 2000 rothstein 2005 1 i ask whether school effec tiveness plays a sufficiently important role in these decisions to create meaningful incentives for more productive school management i adopt a specific understanding of effective ness appropriate to the question at hand a substantial portion of between school differ ences in student performance can be attributed to differences in student body composition this portion includes the effects of individual stu dent characteristics on their own test scores any direct peer group effects and any indirect ef fects of a school s composition on the quality of its instruction if wealthy schools attract better teachers joseph r antos and sherwin rosen 1975 or more parental involvement this is for my purposes a peer effect it depends on the quality of the school s administration only via school composition a school administrator cannot attract demand by offering a school with wealthy students as these can be offered only if wealthy families demand the school in the first place only the remaining portion of a school s contribution to test scores is effectiveness 2 department of economics and woodrow wilson school princeton university wallace hall 3 rd floor princeton nj 08544 e mail jrothst princeton edu i thank alan auerbach tom davidoff caroline hoxby jus tin mccrary rob mcmillan john quigley cecilia rouse emmanuel saez till von wachter four anonymous refer ees editor robert moffitt seminar participants at several institutions and especially david card for helpful sugges tions i am grateful to the college board for essential data and to a national science foundation graduate research fellowship and the fisher center for real estate and urban economics at uc berkeley for funding see cecilia elena rouse 1998 julie b cullen et al 2005 william g howell et al 2002 and alan b krueger and pei zhu 2004 for analyses of several existing nonresidential choice programs though none focuses on the particular issue studied here this definition avoids the need to find observable de terminants of effectiveness which have proved elusive hanushek 1986 my definition however ignores a school s contribution to nontest outcomes e g sports or music if such outcomes motivate parental choices i will conclude that parents do not demand effective schools of

the performance and competitive effects of school autonomy this paper studies a recent british reform that allowed public high schools to opt out of local authority control and become autonomous schools funded directly by the central government schools seeking autonomy had only to propose and win a majority vote among current parents almost one in three high schools voted on autonomy between 1988 and 1997 and using a version of the regression discontinuity design i find large achievement gains at schools in which the vote barely won compared to schools in which it barely lost despite other reforms that ensured that the british education system was by international standards highly competitive a comparison of schools in the geographic neighborhoods of narrow vote winners and narrow vote losers suggests that these gains did not spill over

the credibility revolution in empirical economics how better research design is taking the con out of econometrics since edward leamer s memorable 1983 paper let s take the con out of econometrics empirical microeconomics has experienced a credibility revolution while leamer s suggested remedy sensitivity analysis has played a role in this we argue that the primary engine driving improvement has been a focus on the quality of empirical research designs the advantages of a good research design are perhaps most easily apparent in research using random assignment we begin with an overview of leamer s 1983 critique and his proposed remedies we then turn to the key factors we see contributing to improved empirical work including the availability of more and better data along with advances in theoretical econometric understanding but especially the fact that research design has moved front and center in much of empirical micro we offer a brief digression into macroeconomics and industrial organization where progress by our lights is less dramatic although there is work in both fields that we find encouraging finally we discuss the view that the design pendulum has swung too far critics of design driven studies argue that in pursuit of clean and credible research designs researchers seek good answers instead of good questions we briefly respond to this concern which worries us little

school choice stratification and information on school performance lessons from chile in the early 1980s chile implemented a nationwide school choice system under which the government finances education via a flat per student sub sidy or voucher to the public or private school chosen by a family at present about 94 percent of all schools public religious and secular private are voucher funded more than half of urban schools are private and most of these operate as for profit institutions 1 since the early 1990s chile has also publicized information on school performance and increased per pupil expen diture substantially despite these and other reforms chile has found it challenging to improve students learning outcomes 2 hsieh and urquiola find that the country s rel ative performance in international tests did not change much between 1970 and 1999 3 its performance on the 2000 programme for international student assessment pisa is not only much lower than the oecd average but is similar to that of other latin american countries and low relative to countries with similar income per capita

the impact of charter school attendance on student performance abstract we employ a panel of individual student data on math and reading test performance for five cohorts of students in texas to study the impact of charter school attendance we control for school mobility effects and distinguish movement to a charter school from movement within and between traditional public school districts we find students experience poor test score growth in their initial year in a charter school but that this is followed by recovery in the subsequent years failure to account for this pattern may lead to potentially misleading estimates of the impact of charter attendance on student achievement students who remain in charters largely recover from the initial disruption within approximately 3 years and there is weak evidence that there may be overall gains from charter attendance within this period furthermore students who return to traditional public schools after just 1 or 2 years in a charter do not appear to suffer a lasting negative impact despite their poor average performance in their first year of charter attendance

causal effects in education abstract in recent years a wave of new studies on the effects of educational interventions on student performance has emerged the realization that inputs in the education process are endogenous is important for the validity of traditional findings because of ignoring endogeneity bias all traditional estimates might be wrong recent studies exploit exogenous variation in interventions in education produced by controlled or natural experiments results generated by this methodological innovation differ substantially from the traditional findings this article reviews this new literature illustrates new methods for identifying causal effects of interventions in education and compares the findings with the traditional literature

teacher quality in public and private schools under a voucher system the case of chile chile is unusual in having long term experience with nationwide school vouchers a key criticism of school voucher systems is that they make it easier for private schools to attract better teachers to the detriment of public schools this paper uses longitudinal data from chile to estimate a discrete choice dynamic programming dcdp model of teacher and nonteacher labor supply decisions and to explore how wage policies affect the composition of the teacher labor force in public and private schools in the model individuals first decide whether to get a teaching degree and then choose annually from among five work home sector alternatives empirical results show that private voucher schools attract better teachers than public schools however the existence of the private voucher sector also draws higher productivity individuals into the teaching profession

choice competition and pupil achievement choice and competition in education have recently found growing support from both policy makers and academics yet evidence on the actual benefits of market orientated reforms is at best mixed moreover although the economic rationale for choice and competition is clear in existing work there is rarely an attempt to distinguish between the two concepts in this paper we study whether pupils in primary schools in england with a wider range of school choices achieve better academic outcomes than those whose choice is more limited and whether primary schools facing more competition perform better than those in a more monopolistic situation in simple least squares regression models we find little evidence of a link between choice and achievement but uncover a small positive association between competition and school performance yet this could be related to endogenous school location or pupil sorting in fact an instrumental variable strategy based on discontinuities generated by admissions district boundaries suggests that the performance gains from greater school competition are limited only when we restrict our attention to voluntary aided schools which have more freedom in managing their governance and admission practices do we find some evidence of a positive causal link between competition and pupil achievement jel i20 h70 r5

the failure of input based schooling policies in an effort to improve the quality of schools governments around the world have dramatically increased the resources devoted to them by concentrating on inputs and ignoring the incentives within schools the resources have yielded little in the way of general improvement in student achievement this paper provides a review of the us and international evidence on the effectiveness of such input policies it then contrasts the impact of resources with that of variations in teacher quality that are not systematically related to school resources finally alternative performance incentive policies are described

mobility targeting and private school vouchers simulations are derived from a three district model of low middle and highincome school districts calibrated to new york data with housing stocks that vary within and across districts in this model it is demonstrated that school district targeted vouchers are similar in their impact to nontargeted vouchers but vastly different from vouchers targeted to low income households furthermore strong migration effects are shown to significantly improve the likely equity consequences of voucher programs jel 122 128 h73 persistent frustration with the perceived low quality of public education exacerbated by concerns over the inherently unequal levels of public school quality across school districts has caused policy makers courts and researchers to investigate modifications and alternatives to the current public school system one idea that has received increasing academic and public attention is that of private school vouchers with proponents arguing that the competitive pressures of voucher programs would cause improvements in the efficiency of the publicschool system while at the same time addressing equity concerns if vouchers can be targeted to low income households or low income school districts but aside from a few limited experiments in some u s cities our experience with vouchers in the united states remains virtually nonexistent this limits the amount of information researchers can derive from standard empirical analysis in that it forces them to rely on only current nonvoucher induced differences in competition despite important suggestive results such work may not anticipate all the impacts from a large scale policy such as the voucher policies currently under discussion at the same time theoretical models of school finance are also limited in that they often either focus on only one particular aspect of the general equilibrium school finance problem or they are too rich and complex to yield crisp predictions

ends against the middle determining public service provision when there are private alternatives abstract public provision of a service coexists with private market provision the quality of public provision is determined by majority vote preferences are not single peaked owing to the presence of private alternatives we identify two cases in one majority voting equilibrium always exists and the median income voter is pivotal in the other a necessary condition for equilibrium indentifies the pivotal voter who must have income below the median when equilibrium exists a coalition of middle income households who consume the public alternative will be opposed by a coalition of rich and poor households with the rich choosing private consumption

experimentally estimated impacts of school vouchers on college enrollment and degree attainment abstract we provide the first experimental estimates of the long term impacts of a voucher to attend private school by linking data from a privately sponsored voucher initiative in new york city which awarded the scholarships by lottery to low income families to administrative records on college enrollment and degree attainment we find no significant effects on college enrollment or four year degree attainment of the offer of a voucher however we find substantial marginally significant impacts for minority students and large significant impacts for the children of women born in the united states negative point estimates for the children of non minority and foreign born mothers are not statistically significant at conventional levels the information needed to match students to administrative data on postsecondary outcomes was available for 99 of the sample we find evidence of substantial bias due to attrition in the original evaluation which relied on data collected at follow up sessions

private school vouchers and student achievement an evaluation of the milwaukee parental choice program in 1990 wisconsin began providing vouchers to a small number of low income students to attend nonsectarian private schools controlling for individual fixed effects i compare the test scores of students selected to attend a participating private school with those of unsuccessful applicants and other students from the milwaukee public schools i find that students in the milwaukee parental choice program had faster math score gains than but similar reading score gains to the comparison groups the results appear robust to data imputations and sample attrition although these deficiencies of the data should be kept in mind when interpreting the results

experimental estimates of education production functions this paper analyzes data on 11 600 students and their teachers who were randomly assigned to different size classes from kindergarten through third grade statistical methods are used to adjust for nonrandom attrition and transitions between classes the main conclusions are 1 on average performance on standardized tests increases by four percentile points the first year students attend small classes 2 the test score advantage of students in small classes expands by about one percentile point per year in subsequent years 3 teacher aides and measured teacher characteristics have little effect 4 class size has a larger effect for minority students and those on free lunch 5 hawthorne effects were unlikely

price competition and co operation in a duopoly closed loop supply chain abstract this paper studies co operation and competition issues in a closed loop supply chain the supply chain comprises of two manufacturers who compete for selling their new product as well as for collection of the used products for remanufacturing through a common retailer to analyze the situation mathematical models are developed here for three different cases i non co operative system ii channel co operative system and iii global co operative system for each of the cases we have characterized optimal wholesale price and fraction of collection of used product to draw more managerial insights we also examine the sensitivity of various parameters such as market size acquisition cost and transfer price on total channel profit a numerical study is carried out to illustrate the model and the results reveal that global co operative system is the best among all the three cases considered here weighted shapely value mechanism is used for sharing of surplus generated in the system due to channel co operation

the impact of school choice on student outcomes an analysis of the chicago public schools we explore the impact of school choice on student outcomes in the context of open enrollment within the chicago public schools cps roughly half of the students opt out of their assigned high school to attend a different cps school and these students are much more likely than those who remain in their assigned schools to graduate to determine the source of this apparent benefit we compare outcomes across i similar students with differential access to schooling options and ii travelers and non travelers within the same school the results suggest that other than for students who select career academies the observed cross sectional benefits are likely spurious

how large are the effects from changes in family environment a study of korean american adoptees i analyze a new set of data on korean american adoptees who were quasi randomly assigned to adoptive families i find large effects on adoptees education income and health from assignment to parents with more education and from assignment to smaller families parental education and family size are significantly more correlated with adoptee outcomes than are parental income or neighborhood characteristics outcomes such as drinking smoking and the selectivity of college attended are more determined by nurture than is educational attainment using the standard behavioral genetics variance decomposition i find that shared family environment explains 14 percent of the variation in educational attainment 35 percent ofthe variation in college selectivity and 33 percent of the variation in drinking behavior

school vouchers in practice competition will not hurt you abstract since the introduction of school vouchers in 1992 independent and public schools in sweden operate on equal terms we analyze the effects of competition on the public schools using data on the results of 28 000 ninth graders because the decision on which school to attend is a choice variable sample selection models are used to account for the potential endogeneity of the share of students attending independent schools we use instrumental variable estimation we also estimate panel data models on 288 swedish municipalities our findings support the hypothesis that school results in public schools improve due to competition

school vouchers a survey of the economics literature we review the theoretical computational and empirical research on school vouchers with a focus on the latter our assessment is that the evidence to date is not sufficient to warrant recommending that vouchers be adopted on a widespread basis however multiple positive findings support continued exploration specifically the empirical research on small scale programs does not suggest that awarding students a voucher is a systematically reliable way to improve educational outcomes and some detrimental effects have been found nevertheless in some settings or for some subgroups or outcomes vouchers can have a substantial positive effect on those who use them studies of large scale voucher programs find student sorting as a result of their implementation although of varying magnitude evidence on both small scale and large scale programs suggests that competition induced by vouchers leads public schools to improve moreover research is making progress on understanding how vouchers may be designed to limit adverse effects from sorting while preserving positive effects related to competition finally our sense is that work originating in a single case e g a given country or in a single research approach e g experimental designs will not provide a full understanding of voucher effects fairly wide ranging empirical and theoretical work will be necessary to make progress

can increasing private school participation and monetary loss in a voucher program affect public school performance evidence from milwaukee abstract the milwaukee voucher program as implemented in 1990 allowed only non sectarian private schools to participate in the program following a wisconsin supreme court ruling the program saw a major shift and entered into its second phase when religious private schools were allowed to participate for the first time in 1998 this led to more than a three fold increase in the number of private schools and almost a four fold increase in the number of choice students moreover due to some changes in funding provisions the revenue loss per student from vouchers increased in the second phase of the program this paper analyzes the impacts of increase in competition brought about by these changes on public school performance in milwaukee using data from 1987 to 2002 and a difference in differences estimation strategy in trends the paper finds that these changes have led to an improvement of the public schools in the second phase of the program as compared to the first phase the results are robust to alternative samples and specifications and survive several sensitivity checks including correcting for mean reversion the findings imply that voucher design matters and choice of parameters in a voucher program is crucial as far as impacts on public school incentives and performance are concerned

contract choice in modern agriculture cash rent versus cropshare e conomists have expended enormous effort examining the rationale for various contractual arrangements in agriculture particularly sharecropping while economists have made considerable theoretical efforts to understand agricultural contracts few empirical studies have been undertaken the dearth of empirical analyses of agricultural contracts is particularly striking for modern western agriculture this is an important omission not only because the existing empirical work tends to focus on the question of efficiency but also because the theoretical models tend to examine contracts that bear little resemblance to those found in the united states today

every catholic child in a catholic school historical resistance to state schooling contemporary private competition and student achievement across countries nineteenth century catholic doctrine strongly opposed state schooling we show that countries with larger shares of catholics in 1900 but without a catholic state religion tend to have larger shares of privately operated schools even today we use this historical pattern as a natural experiment to estimate the causal effect of contemporary private competition on student achievement in cross country student level analyses our results show that larger shares of privately operated schools lead to better student achievement in mathematics science and reading and to lower total education spending even after controlling for current catholic shares

does competition among public schools benefit students and taxpayers comment school choice policies promise to align the incentives of school administrators with the demands of parents and may therefore lead to more efficient educational production milton friedman 1962 geoffrey brennan and james buchanan 1980 john chubb and terry m moe 1990 absent a large scale school voucher program in the united states however this prediction has been difficult to test several authors e g melvin v borland and roy m howsen 1992 clive r belfield and henry m levin 2002 have suggested studying the effects of tiebout choice the use of the residential location decision to select among local monopoly education providers the idea here is that fragmented governance induces competition among school districts analogous to that which would occur among schools with nonresidential choice in an influential paper caroline m hoxby 2000 points out that current governance structures are potentially endogenous to school productivity and proposes that variation in topography which may have influenced optimal jurisdiction size before modern transportation technologies provides a source of exogenous variation she estimates instrumental variables regressions of individual test scores and school spending on a metropolitan level tiebout choice index defined as one minus a herfindahl concentration index with districts enrollments as their market shares using as excluded instruments the number of larger and smaller streams in the area she reports substantial positive effects of district fragmentation on student test scores and negative effects on spending this comment presents a reanalysis of hoxby s test score results which form the core of her empirical analysis these results turn out to be quite sensitive to plausible alterations to hoxby s specification in particular the large significant effect of choice on achievement obtains

long term educational consequences of secondary school vouchers evidence from administrative records in colombia colombia s paces program provided over 125 000 poor children with vouchers that covered the cost of private secondary school the vouchers were renewable annually conditional on adequate academic progress since many vouchers were assigned by lottery program effects can reliably be assessed by comparing lottery winners and losers estimates using administrative records suggest the paces program increases secondary school completion rates by 15 to 20 percent correcting for the greater percentage of lottery winners taking college admissions tests the program increased test scores by two tenths of a standard deviation in the distribution of potential test scores jel i21 j12 i28

gender and performance evidence from school assignment by randomized lottery school choice programs are intended to improve student achievement by allowing for better matches between students and schools it is not clear however that academic achievement will improve if parents make school choice decisions over both academic and nonacademic school attributes justine s hastings et al 2005 2006 indeed many randomized studies of impacts of school choice find little or no effect of school choice on academic outcomes for example initial evaluations of randomized voucher experiments in milwaukee and new york city found modest academic impacts on eligible students john f witte et al 1995 daniel p mayer et al 2002 more recently evaluations of public school choice lotteries in chicago and charlotte have found no difference between the average lottery winner and loser in academic outcomes such as test scores julie cullen et al 2003 hastings et al 2006 when parents are choosing schools for academic and nonacademic reasons school choice may increase utility but not necessarily improve academic outcomes there is growing evidence that educational interventions may have heterogeneous treatment effects by gender analysis of the moving to opportunity demonstration in which parents were randomly given the opportunity to move to nonpoverty neighborhoods found improvements in education mental health and criminal behavior for females but negative effects on males jeffrey r kling and jeffrey b liebman 2004 similarly michael anderson 2005 reanalyzed data from three randomized trials of early childhood education and found that all of the long term benefits accrued to girls and not to boys we use data from a public school choice program with school assignment by lottery to estimate the impacts on academic outcomes by race and gender of attending a first choice school our data come from the charlottemecklenburg school district cms in north carolina which introduced district wide public school choice in the fall of 2002 after a racebased busing plan was terminated by the courts the data include students choices lottery numbers school assignments demographics and academic achievement for the years surrounding implementation of school choice we compare outcomes for those making similar choices whose school assignment was determined solely by lottery number overall there was no gain in academic achievement for those winning the lottery white females did experience significant improvements in test scores when randomized into their first choice school however white females were also more likely to choose academically focused magnets and among those who won the lottery reported significant increases in time spent on homework our evidence suggests that school choice programs may have heterogeneous treatment effects by gender which are related to differences in the factors driving parental choices

a note on itqs and optimal investment abstract this paper considers the incentives to invest under an itq management regime when labor is rewarded by the so called share system it is shown that the share system is likely to result in overinvestment under itqs labor market power of crew reflected in a high labor share of the catch might correct for this and might even prevent excessive investment when there is competition for a total catch quota

testing for input substitution in a regulated fishery input restrictions are commonly used to prevent rent dissipation in fisheries this paper examines whether these schemes are successful by calculating the degree of input substitution between restricted and unrestricted inputs conventional elasticities of substitution cannot be used when the firm faces controls on the use of some inputs in this case the appropriate measure of substitution the elasticity of intensity must be used data from the british columbia salmon fishery provide evidence of input substitution possibilities for two vessel types these results call into question the usefulness of input control schemes

accountability and flexibility in public schools evidence from boston s charters and pilots charter schools are publicly funded but operate outside the regulatory framework and collective bargaining agreements characteristic of traditional public schools in return for this freedom charter schools are subject to heightened accountability this paper estimates the impact of charter school attendance on student achievement using data from boston where charter schools enroll a growing share of students we also evaluate an alternative to the charter model boston s pilot schools these schools have some of the independence of charter schools but operate within the school district face little risk of closure and are covered by many of same collective bargaining provisions as traditional public schools estimates using student assignment lotteries show large and significant test score gains for charter lottery winners in middle and high school in contrast lottery based estimates for pilot schools are small and mostly insignificant the large positive lottery based estimates for charter schools are similar to estimates constructed using statistical controls in the same sample but larger than those using statistical controls in a wider sample of schools the latter are still substantial however the estimates for pilot schools are smaller and more variable than those for charters with some significant negative effects

are commercial fishers risk lovers fishers are risk averse according to most empirical studies while expected utility theory predicts risk neutrality even for sizable stakes we test this prediction using data from a stated choice experiment with swedish commercial fishers our results show that only 48 of the fishers can be broadly characterized as risk neutral while 26 are modestly risk averse and 26 are strongly riskaverse fishers are more risk neutral the higher the fraction of their household s income comes from fishing sensitivity testing implies that modest stake decisions like a few days of fishing are not influenced by wealth level

sharecropping and the interlinking of agrarian markets one of the often noted features of less developed agrarian economies is the existence of interlinkages among the land labor credit and product markets the landlord is often the supplier of credit he frequently purchases and markets the output of the tenant farmers and often sells raw materials and even consumption goods to his tenant farmers how can this phenomenon be explained what are the welfare consequences of attempts to restrict these practices which often seem to constitute restraints on free trade these are the questions to which this paper is addressed a general set of arguments applicable to both competitive and noncompetitive environments are presented to situations where all the terms of the contract are determined in an optimal way as well as to situations where many of the terms are specified institutionally section i examines interlinked credit and tenancy contracts section ii examines interlinked marketing and tenancy contracts section iii points out the possible interlinking between labor contracts and consumption goods markets and section iv presents the different equilibrium frameworks discussed in the paper such as monopoly monopsony competition and equilibria with surplus labor

public regulation and the structure of production in multiproduct industries an application to the new england otter trawl industry this article considers the problem of managing multispecies fishing industries as one of regulating the production of individual multiproduct firms the multispecies new england otter trawl industry is examined within this framework empirical results derived from estimating a multiproduct profitfunction indicate that management consistent with the structures ofmultiproduct production and costs would directly regulate inputs little support is provided for applying the traditional bioeconomic model to the fishery studied

priorities in school choice the case of the boston mechanism in barcelona abstract the boston mechanism is a school allocation procedure that is widely used around the world and has been criticized for its incentive problems in order to resolve overdemands for a given school most often priority is given to families living in the neighborhood of the school using a very rich data set on school applications for the case of the boston mechanism in barcelona we exploit an unexpected change in the definition of neighborhood this change allows us to identify that a large fraction of families systematically ranks first high priority schools neighborhood schools in this case additional data on school enrollment decisions and census data shows that some seemingly unsophisticated parents are high income families that can rank hard to get schools because they can afford the outside option of a private school in case they do not get in this sheds light on important inequalities beyond parents lack of sophistication found in the literature

do accountability and voucher threats improve low performing schools abstract we study the effects of the threat of vouchers and stigma in florida on the performance of low performing schools estimates of the change in raw test scores from the first year of the reform are consistent with the early results which claimed large improvements associated with the threat of vouchers however we also find that much of this estimated effect may be due to other factors the relative gains in reading are largely explained by changing student characteristics and the gains in math though larger appear limited to the high stakes grade we also find some evidence that these improvements were due more to the stigma of receiving the low grade rather than the threat of vouchers

the effect of school closings on student achievement abstract many school districts across the country are shutting schools but school closing policies remain a very controversial issue the current study investigates the effects of school closing policies on student achievement by examining over 200 school closings in michigan relative to the previous literature the analysis uses a broader set of school closings to thoroughly investigate heterogeneity in treatment effects based on the performance level of the closed school the results indicate that on average school closings in michigan did no persistent harm to the achievement of displaced students moreover students displaced from relatively low performing schools experience achievement gains the displacement of students and teachers creates modest negative spillover effects on the receiving schools however hence the closing of low performing schools may generate some achievement gains for displaced students but not without imposing spillover effects on a large number of students in receiving schools

vouchers for private schooling in colombia evidence from a randomized natural experiment colombia used lotteries to distribute vouchers which partially covered the cost of private secondary school for students who maintained satisfactory academic progress three years after the lotteries winners were about 10 percentage points more likely to have finished 8th grade primarily because they were less likely to repeat grades and scored 0 2 standard deviations higher on achievement tests there is some evidence that winners worked less than losers and were less likely to marry or cohabit as teenagers benefits to participants likely exceeded the 24 per winner additional cost to the government of supplying vouchers instead of public school places

the impact of an adult education voucher program evidence from a randomized field experiment abstract lifelong learning is often promoted in aging societies but little is known about its returns or governments ability to advance it this paper evaluates the effects of a large scale randomized field experiment issuing vouchers for adult education in switzerland we find no significant average effects of the voucher program on earnings employment and subsequent education 1 year after treatment but effects are heterogeneous low educated individuals are most likely to profit from adult education but least likely to use the voucher in addition the public voucher program appears to crowd out firm financed training the findings cast doubt on the effectiveness of untargeted voucher programs in promoting labor market outcomes through adult education

the lay system in commercial fisheries origin and implications abstract in most commercial fisheries the crew is remunerated via some form of the lay system under the lay system the crew is paid with a share of revenues or a share of revenues less costs naturally the presence and the functioning of the lay system are well known and accepted as one of fishery s important institutions compared with share contracts in agriculture however the lay in fisheries has garnered relatively little research this article has two goals first we provide an explanation for the existence of the lay system as an incentive mechanism to alleviate a potential team agency problem this explanation of the lay system explains anomalies such as the presence of wages in some fisheries that are odds with the theory of pure risk sharing second we show the implications of the lay system for econometric modeling of fisheries and for understanding firm behavior in general we conclude that models that fail to account explicitly for the incentive properties of shares are likely to provide poor representations of fishing firm behavior the thrust of the paper is that the formation and working of the lay system are a fundamental force in fisheries influencing firm behavior and research results in a way that has been largely ignored

finishing high school and starting college do catholic schools make a difference in this paper we consider two measures of the relative effectiveness of public and catholic schools finishing high school and starting college these measures are potentially more important indicators of school quality than standardized test scores in light of the economic consequences of obtaining more education single equation estimates suggest that for the typical student attending a catholic high school raises the probability of finishing high school or entering a four year college by thirteen percentage points in bivariate probit models we find almost no evidence that our single equation estimates are subject to selection bias

admission tuition and financial aid policies in the market for higher education we present an equilibrium model of the market for higher education our model simultaneously predicts student selection into institutions of higher education financial aid educational expenditures and educational outcomes we show that the model gives rise to a strict hierarchy of colleges that differ by the educational quality provided to the students we also develop a new estimation procedure that exploits the observed variation in prices within colleges identification is based on variation in endowments and technology it does not rely on observed variation in potentially endogenous characteristics of colleges such as peer quality measures and expenditures we estimate the structural parameters using data collected by the national center for education statistics and aggregate data from peterson s and the national science foundation

where does voucher funding go how large scale subsidy programs affect private school revenue enrollment and prices using a new dataset constructed from nonprofit tax returns this paper explores how vouchers and other large scale programs subsidizing private school attendance have affected the fiscal outcomes of private schools and the affordability of a private education we find that subsidy programs created a large transfer of public funding to private schools suggesting that every dollar of funding increased revenue by a dollar or more turning to the incidence of subsidies and the impact of subsidies on enrollment our findings depend on the type of program introduced programs that restrict eligibility to certain groups of students create large enrollment gains but no change in price while programs that offer unrestricted subsidies lead to price increases but no change in enrollment we calculate elasticities of demand and supply for private schools and discuss welfare effects