For over twenty years, a voucher system has been used in Chile to promote competition in the educational system between public and private schools. Attending a private subsidized school is associated with increased standardized test scores, but the apparent impact is relatively small....

This volume was prepared by Benedikt Siegler while working at the Center for the Economics of Education of the Ifo Institute. It was completed in June 2014 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich (LMU) in November 2014. The thesis includes...

The reform of higher education in Russia, based on standardized tests and educational vouchers, was intended to reduce inequalities in access to higher education. The initiative with the vouchers has failed and by now is already forgotten while the national test is planned to be introduced...

Using the experience of the Educational Quality Inputs (EQI) Scheme in Sri Lanka, the paper examines the distributional aspects of formula-based funding and efficiency of decentralized management of education funds in a developing country setting. The study finds that the EQI fund distribution...

For over twenty years, a voucher system has been used in Chile to promote competition in the educational system between public and private schools. Attending a private subsidized school is associated with increased standardized test scores, but the apparent impact is relatively small....

This paper examines how schools districts have responded to fiscal constraints in the past to gain insight into how they might respond in the future. It uses cross sectional data for Texas and New York first to develop a measure of the fiscal condition of each district and, second, to examine...

School choice initiatives and charter schools have grown substantially in the past two and a half decades. Economists argue that this is a move toward more competition and should lead to improved school system performance. However, school choice and charter school enabling laws can be quite...

Twenty-five years ago, Sweden enacted the most ambitious school choice policy seen in the Western world, allowing families to select any school regardless of their residence and independent providers to open new Free Schools after satisfying some general regulatory requirements. This made...

The Swedish school system suffers from profound problems with teacher recruitment and retention, knowledge decline, and grade inflation. Absenteeism is high, and psychiatric disorders have risen sharply among Swedish pupils in the last ten years. In this pioneering analysis of the consequences...