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 presents a new approach for measuring the effects of competition on school performance. We use an equilibrium sorting model to generate an intuitive measure of the competition each school faces, captured by the slope of the school’s demand curve. We then show that this competition...