Can competition and the existence of profit-seeking actors in the school market improve educational quality? To see cost-efficient, long-term improvements, we identify the school system’s capacity for knowledge-enhancing innovation as crucial and explore this question by examining Swedish...

Can competition and the existence of profit-seeking actors in the school market improve educational quality? To see cost-efficient, long-term improvements, we identify the school system's capacity for knowledge-enhancing innovation as crucial and explore this question by examining Swedish...

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the discussion of the effects of published school rankings based on average scores obtained by students on national exams. We study the effectiveness of this (low-stakes) accountability mechanism; we analyze whether students react to these rankings,...

Direct provision of public services can alter the balance of resources across income groups. We focus on the issues arising when taking account of the impact of publicly provided education services across the income distribution. We combine OECD information on spending per student in particular...

This paper studies the role of public policy to promote efficiency in human capital accumulation in the representative agent framework. Agents accumulate human capital by spending time in home study and in publicly provided schools. The individual faces an aggregate externality in the...

La provisión de un bien privado por parte del sector público comopolítica de redistribución del ingreso, es considerada una buena herramienta antela falta de información sobre los agentes. No obstante, dicha política puedeacarrear disyuntivas entre calidad y redistribución, y entre...

A widely accepted result in the literature is that the majority of votersare against the introduction of universal vouchers. Chen and West (2000) predict that voters' attitudes towards selective vouchers (SV) may be dif- ferent. They claim that voters are indi®erent between the no-voucher and...

We develop a theoretical model to analyze how the lack of full enrollment affects the quality of public education chosen by majority voting. In our model, the households choose whether to enrol their child at school or not. Poor households do not send their children to school because there is an...

In this paper, we use data from the German PISA 2003 sample to study the effects of central exit examinations on student performance, student attitudes, and teacher behavior. Unlike earlier studies we use (i) a value-added measure to pin down the effect of central exit exams on learning in the...

The debate on new public management, together with the shortage of public funds, has had a considerable impact on public administration. Accordingly, many governments have searched positive impacts on the efficiency, equity and quality provision of public services through increasing competition...