This paper evaluates average educational performance effects of an expanding independent school sector at the compulsory level by assessing a radical voucher reform that was implemented in Sweden in 1992. Starting from a situation where all public schools were essentially local monopolists, the...

This paper evaluates average educational performance effects of an expanding independent school sector at the compulsory level by assessing a radical voucher reform that was implemented in Sweden in 1992. Starting from a situation where all public schools were essentially local monopolists, the...

The Covid-19 pandemic drastically disrupted the functioning of U.S. public schools, potentially changing the relative appeal of alternatives such as homeschooling and private schools. Using longitudinal student-level administrative data from Michigan and nationally representative data from the...

This paper explores gender inequality within households in the decision of private versus government school choice in India. Using a three-period longitudinal dataset on rural households from Uttar Pradesh, a northern state of India, this paper estimates a household fixed effects model and finds...

The literature suggests that competition among schools might increase quality. However, not much empirical evidence is present as only a few countries allow competition at a large scale. One exception is the Netherlands. Free parental choice is the leading principle of the Dutch education system...

This paper studies the evolution of school segregation in Sweden in the aftermath of the 1992 universal school voucher reform, which spurred the establishment of new independent voucher schools and introduced parental choice. The empirical analysis assesses the relative importance of...

Public school choice often yields student placements that are neither fair nor efficient. Kesten (2010) proposed an efficiency-adjusted deferred acceptance algorithm (EADAM) that allows students to consent to waive priorities that have no effect on their assignment. In this article, we provide...

Many urban school districts in the United States and OECD countries confront the necessity of closing schools due to declining enrollments. To address this important policy question, we formulate a sequential game where a superintendent is tasked with closing down a certain percentage of student...

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...

The paper argues that access to public infrastructure plays a crucial role on the presence of private schools in a community, as it could not only minimise the cost of production, but also ensure a high return to private investment. Results using community, school and child/household-level PROBE...