The elimination of school fees from public primary education under the Free Primary Education (FPE) Policy in Kenya in 2003 has increased enrollment by 22 percent in the first year alone. Some experts, however, suggest that the FPE has reduced the quality of education in public schools and...

Among policymakers, educators and economists there remains a strong, sometimes heated, debate on the extent to which good schools matter. This is seen, for instance, in the strong trend towards establishing accountability systems in education in many countries across the world. In this paper, in...

We examine the effect of single motherhood on children’s secondary school track choice using 12-year-old children drawn from the German Socio-Economic Panel. In line with previous studies for the U.S., the U.K. and Sweden, we find a negative correlation between single motherhood and...

We consider the problem of assigning students to schools on the basis of priorities. Students are allowed to have equal priority at a school. We characterize the efficient rules which weakly/strongly respect students’ priorities. When priority orderings are not strict, it is not possible to...

In present day Germany, one in seven children is raised in a single parent household. We investigate the effect of single parenthood on children’s educational attainment, measured by the school track at the age 14, using ordered probit models. We study whether the effect of living in single...

This paper provides an overview of some of the findings of a recently completed study of school choice in 33 local schools which may be indicative of the effect of an increase in the marketisation of schools. Since it is unlikely that debate over parental choice can be settled by theoretical...

A large school consolidation reform in the Netherlands changed minimum school size rules underlying public funding. The supply of schools decreased by 15 percent, but this varied considerably across municipalities. We find that reducing the number of schools by 10 percent increases pupils'...

We examine the housing market, residential mobility, and academic performance changes that occur soon after a school fails to achieve Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) (for the second time) in the Charlotte, NC school district. Charlotte is a school district with substantial opportunities for...

In this paper, I investigate whether increases in public education expenditures lead to reductions in private school enrollment. In order to deal with the endogeneity of public expenditures, I use as a natural experiment the 1998 FUNDEF reform in Brazil that caused exogenous variations in local...