Summary of all presentation articles for public sector economics
81 views 4 purchases
Course
Public sector economics (30L209B6)
Institution
Tilburg University (UVT)
Summary of the following articles:
Abdulkadiroglu et al. 2011
Muralidharan & Sundararaman 2015
Muralidharan & Sundararaman 2015
Bell et al. 2019
Bell et al. 2019
Chetty & Saez 2013
Chetty & Saez 2013
Meyer & Rosenbaum 2001
Meyer & Rosenbaum 2001
Saez et al. 2019
Saez et al. 2019
Finkel...
PUBLIC SECTOR ECONOMICS
ARTICLES OF GROUP PRESENTATIONS
Week 2
The aggregate effect of school choice: Evidence from a two-stage experiment in India
by Muralidharan, K. & Sundararaman, V. (2015)
Main question
What are the individual and aggregate effects of school choice in developing countries?
Main idea of the article
We present experimental evidence on the impact of a school choice program in the Indian
state of Andhra Pradesh (AP) that featured a unique two-stage randomization of the offer of
a voucher (across villages as well as students). The study design featured a unique two-
stage lottery-based allocation of vouchers that created both student-level and market-level
experiments, which allows us to study the individual and the aggregate effects of school
choice (including spillovers).
The experiment was a large one that led to 23 percent of students in public schools in
program villages moving to a private school. Participation of private schools in the voucher
program was voluntary, but they were not permitted to selectively accept or reject voucher-
winning students.
Why they do the article
One of the most important trends in primary education in developing countries over the past
two decades has been the rapid growth of private schools, with recent estimates showing
that private schools now account for over 20 percent of total primary school enrolment in
low-income countries. The growing market share of fee-charging private schools is
especially striking because it is taking place in a context of increased spending on
public education and nearly universal access to free public primary schools, and
raises important questions regarding the effectiveness of private schools in these
settings and the optimal policy response to their growth.
Opponents of the growth of private schooling argue that it has led to economic stratification
of education systems, and weakened the public education system by causing the middle
class to secede. They also worry that private schools compete by cream-skimming students
and attract parents and students on the basis of superior average levels of test scores, but
that they may not be adding more value to the marginal applicant. 1 Others contend that
private schools in developing countries have grown in response to failures of the public
schooling system, that they are more accountable and responsive to parents, that the
revealed preference of parents suggests that they are likely to be better than public schools,
and that policy makers should be more open to voucher-like models that combine public
funding and private provision of education.
There is very little rigorous empirical evidence on
the relative effectiveness of private and public
schools in low-income countries. Spillover effects
are never identified.
Method
Unique two-stage randomization (RCT)
,Britt Schraauwen
The study design featured a unique two-stage lottery-based allocation of vouchers that
created both student-level and market-level experiments, which allows us to study the
individual and the aggregate effects of school choice (including spillovers).
Experimental evaluations of school voucher programs to date typically feature excess
demand for a limited number of vouchers, which are allocated among applicants by lottery.
Such a design creates four groups of students as shown in Figure I (Panel A): non-
applicants (group 1), applicants who lose the lottery (group 2), applicants who win (group 3),
and students in private schools to begin with (group 4). The lottery is used to estimate the
impact of winning a voucher conditional on applying for it (comparing groups 3 and 2), and
the impact of attending a private school (using the lottery as an instrumental variable for
attending a private school).
Once the applications were completed, 90 villages (stratified by district) were
assigned by lottery to be voucher villages ( Figure I , Panel A), while the other 90
villages continued “as usual” with no voucher program ( Figure I , Panel B).
Conditional on being a voucher village, a second lottery was conducted to offer the
vouchers to a subset of applicants. The design therefore created two lottery-based
comparison groups—those who did not get the voucher due to their village not being
selected for the program (group 2C in Figure I ), and those who did not get the
voucher due to losing the individual level lottery conducted within voucher villages
(group 2T in Figure I ).
Furthermore, our two-stage design allows us to conduct the first experimental analysis of the
spillover effects of school choice programs on nonapplicants, lottery losers, and private
school students.
Main findings
- Using official data and data collected during unannounced visits to schools, we find
that private schools have a longer school day, a longer school year, lower teacher
absence, higher teaching activity, and better school hygiene. We find no significant
change in household spending or in time spent doing homework among voucher-
winning students, suggesting that the effect of school choice on test scores (if any) is
likely to be due to changes in school as opposed to household factors.
- After two and four years of the program, we find no difference between test scores of
lottery winners and losers on Telugu (native language), math, English, and
science/social studies, suggesting that the large cross-sectional differences in test
scores across public and private schools mostly reflect omitted variables.
- However, analysis of school time use data reveals that private schools spend
significantly less instructional time on Telugu (40% less) and math (32% less) than
public schools, and instead spend more time on English and science and social
studies (EVS). They also teach a third language, Hindi, which is not taught in public
primary schools.
- Furthermore, the mean cost per student in the private schools in our sample was less
than a third of the cost in public schools. Thus, private schools in this setting deliver
slightly better test score gains than their public counterparts (better on Hindi and
same in other subjects), and do so at a substantially lower cost per student.
- We find no evidence of spillovers on public school students who do not apply for the
voucher, or on private school students (which can be affected by previously public
school students), suggesting that the positive effects on voucher winners did not
come at the expense of other students.
- Instrumental variable (IV) estimates suggest that students who switched from
attending a public school to a Telugu-medium private school did better than those
attending an English-medium one (especially on nonlanguage subjects). The IV
estimates have large standard errors and are not precise, but they suggest that
private schools may have been even more effective when students did not
,Britt Schraauwen
experience the disruption of changing their medium of instruction. They also
suggest that switching to English-medium schools may have negative effects on first-
generation learners' literacy in the native language and on their learning of content in
other nonlanguage subjects. Finally, we find suggestive evidence that the impact of
the vouchers may have been higher in markets with greater choice and competition.
Accountability and flexibility in public schools: Evidence from Boston's charters and
pilots by Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Joshua D. Angrist, Susan M., Dynarski Thomas J. Kane
and Paraga A. Pathak. (2011)
Main question
What is the effect of going to a charter or pilot school on student performance?
Main idea of the article
We use student assignment lotteries to estimate the effect of charter school attendance on
student achievement in Boston. We also evaluate a related alternative, Boston’s pilot
schools. Pilot schools have some of the independence of charter schools but are in the
Boston Public School district and are covered by some collective bargaining provisions. The
schools in our study are attended by students who would otherwise attend traditional Boston
public schools. The BPS system serves a disproportionately black and Hispanic student
population. Like students in many urban schools, BPS students have lower test scores,
lower high school graduation rates, and areless likely to go to college than students from
nearby suburban districts.
Why they do the article
Charter schools operate with considerably more independence than traditional public
schools. They are free to structure their curriculum and school environment. Among other
things, many charter schools fit more instructional hours into a year by running longer school
days and providing instruction on weekends and during the summer. Although charter
students made up only 2.9% of U.S. public school enrollment in 2008–2009, charter
enrollment has grown rapidly and seems likely to accelerate in the near future (NAPCS
2009). Charter schools are an active component of the contemporary education reform
movement’s pursuit of accountability and flexibility in public education. At the same time,
charter schools are controversial because after a transition period in which the state
provides subsidies, they are typically funded by students’ home (or “sending”) districts.
The purpose of this article is to assess the causal effects of charter school attendance
and a closely related alternative, called pilot schools, on student achievement. Pilot
schools arose in Boston as a union-supported alternative to charter schools. Boston’s
charter schools are constituted by the state as individual school districts and therefore
operate independently of the Boston Public Schools (BPS). In contrast, Boston’s pilot
schools are part of the BPS district, and the extent to which they operate outside collective
bargaining provisions is spelled out in school-specific election-to-work agreements signed by
pilot faculty. In addition to these negotiated exemptions, pilot schools have more flexibility
and decision-making powers over school budgets, academic programs, and educational
policies than do traditional BPS schools. This freedom includes the opportunity to set school
policies related to student promotion, graduation, discipline, and attendance. In practice, pilot
schools occupy a middle ground between charter schools and traditional public schools.
Method
Problem that often arises when investigating schools is the selection bias: Students who
attend charter and pilot schools differ in a number of ways from the general pool of public
school students, a fact that may bias naive comparisons. We can hope to eliminate some of
this bias by controlling for student characteristics such as free lunch status, but the
, Britt Schraauwen
possibility remains of bias from unobserved variables such as motivation or family
background.
An important aspect of our study, therefore, is the use of student admissions lotteries to
estimate causal effects. These lotteries, which admit applicants randomly at oversubscribed
schools, are used to construct a quasi-experimental research design that should generate
unbiased estimates of the causal effects of charter and pilot attendance.
OLS regression of test scores as a function of time spent in charger schools would
bias the results (omitted-variable bias), therefore the authors use an IV estimation:
Natural Experiment using Admission Lotteries IV.
Main findings
- Charter schools with binding assignment lotteries appear to generate larger gains
than other charters.
- Lottery-based estimates show large score gains for students who spend time
at a charter school but zero or even negative effects of time spent in a pilot
school. Why? For one thing, the student-teacher ratio is smaller in charter high
schools while the school day and year arelongerinbothcharterhighschools and
charter middle schools. Charter teaching staff are also unusually young. These
differences may originate in collective bargaining agreements that make it relatively
expensive for pilot schools to expand instructional hours and staffing and that favor
teacher seniority over classroom effectiveness. In addition, most of the charter
schools in our lottery sample embrace elements of the No Excuses model, an
instructional paradigm that is not common in public schools, pilot or otherwise.
- Many of the charter schools in our study aspire to boost minority achievement, so a
natural benchmark for charter effectiveness is the black-white test score gap. Among
students attending regular BPS middle schools, blacks score about 0.7σ below σ below
whites in language arts and 0.8σ below whites in math. The charter school effects
reported here are therefore large enough to reduce the black-white reading gap
in middle school by two-thirds. The even larger estimated math gains (about 0.4σ)
are more than enough to eliminate the racial gap in math while students are in
middle school. Effects of roughly 0.2σ estimated for high school ELA and math are
large enough to close the black-white high school gap of about 0.8σ in both subjects
(assuming four years of charter high school enrollment).
- In an effort to gauge the generality of these findings, we complement the quasi-
experimental lottery analysis with an observational analysis of the full set of charter
and pilot schools. The observational analysis controls for demographic and
background characteristics as well as students’ lagged test scores (for example, the
elementary school scores of middle school students). This investigation produces
estimates remarkably similar to the lottery-based estimates of charter effects when
carried out in the sample of charter schools that have lotteries, lending credence to
the observational analysis. At the same time, the observational analysis suggests
that the charter schools in the lottery study are better than others in the sense of
generating larger treatment effects. The schools in the Boston lottery study generally
subscribe to a philosophy and pedagogical approach know as “No Excuses.” We
therefore see our lottery estimates as indicative of what the NoExcuses charter
model can accomplish, rather than an overall charter-school treatment effect.
Week 4
Do tax cuts produce more Einsteins? The impacts of financial incentives versus
exposure to innovation on the supply of inventors by Bell, A., Chetty, R., Jaraval, X.,
Petkova, N. & Van Reenen, J. (2019)
The benefits of buying summaries with Stuvia:
Guaranteed quality through customer reviews
Stuvia customers have reviewed more than 700,000 summaries. This how you know that you are buying the best documents.
Quick and easy check-out
You can quickly pay through credit card or Stuvia-credit for the summaries. There is no membership needed.
Focus on what matters
Your fellow students write the study notes themselves, which is why the documents are always reliable and up-to-date. This ensures you quickly get to the core!
Frequently asked questions
What do I get when I buy this document?
You get a PDF, available immediately after your purchase. The purchased document is accessible anytime, anywhere and indefinitely through your profile.
Satisfaction guarantee: how does it work?
Our satisfaction guarantee ensures that you always find a study document that suits you well. You fill out a form, and our customer service team takes care of the rest.
Who am I buying these notes from?
Stuvia is a marketplace, so you are not buying this document from us, but from seller britt1910. Stuvia facilitates payment to the seller.
Will I be stuck with a subscription?
No, you only buy these notes for $4.75. You're not tied to anything after your purchase.
