Scale economies can offset the benefits of school competition (2011) (Joint with Edwin Leuven and Hessel Oosterbeek)

Abstract:

For a given size of an educational market, more school choice and competition in the form of more suppliers, means that suppliers will on average serve fewer pupils. This implies a trade-off between scale and competition which has been largely ignored in the economics of education literature. We study this trade-off using a large school consolidation reform in the Netherlands that decreased the supply of schools by on average 15 percent, but where the reduction in the supply of schools varied considerably across municipalities. We find that reducing the number of schools by 10 percent increases pupils’ achievement by about 3 percent of a standard deviation.We present evidence that in our setting scale effects dominate the effects of choice and competition. More generally, our results illustrate that ignoring scale effects can lead to substantial bias in general equilibrium estimates of choice and competition. Download this paper

Work in progress

Birth order and human capital development: Evidence from Ecuador ( joint with Erik Plug and Jose Rosero)

The effect of additional money for low ability pupils; A nonparametric bounds analysis