Does competition among public schools benefit students and taxpayers?
Subtitle: a comment on Hoxby (2000)
By: Jesse Rothstein.
Contributors: National Bureau of Economic Research.
Series: NBER working paper series ;; working paper 11215; Working paper series (National Bureau of Economic Research : Online) ;; working paper no. 11215.
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Cambridge, MA
Language: eng
Format: Electronic resource
Subjects: Hoxby, Caroline Minter.; School choice -- United States.; School choice -- Economic aspects -- United States.; Public schools -- United States.
Description: "In an influential paper, Hoxby (2000) studies the relationship between the degree of so-called "Tiebout choice" among local school districts within a metropolitan area and average test scores.  She argues that choice is endogenous to school quality, and instruments with the number of larger and smaller streams.  She finds a large positive effect of choice on test scores, which she interprets as evidence that school choice induces greater school productivity.  This paper revisits Hoxby's analysis.  I document several important errors in Hoxby's data and code.  I also demonstrate that the estimated choice effect is extremely sensitive to the way that "larger streams" are coded.  When Hoxby's hand count of larger streams is replaced with any of several alternative, easily replicable measures, there is no significant difference between IV and OLS, each of which indicates a choice effect near zero.  There is thus little evidence that schools respond to Tiebout competition by raising productivity.  A data appendix for this paper is available online*Published: Forthcoming, American Economic Review"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
Title from PDF file as viewed on 3/30/2005.
Also available in print.
System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.