Demand (and Supply) in an Inter-District Public School Choice Program

Randall Reback ()

No 501, Working Papers from Barnard College, Department of Economics

Abstract: This study examines parents’ demand for sending their children to a public school located outside their residential school district. Using a unique data set that contains information concerning both inter-district transfers and rejections of transfer applications, I am able to identify which school district characteristics attract the greatest demand for incoming transfers. The analyses reveal that mean student test scores are stronger predictors of transfer demand than both students’ socio-economic characteristics and school district spending, suggesting that parents care more about outcomes than inputs. In addition, while districts are only supposed to reject transfer students due to capacity concerns, districts’ supply decisions are also correlated with differences in student performance across neighboring districts.

Keywords: school choice; inter-district open enrollment; public school demand (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H40 I21 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2004-10, Revised 2006-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-pbe and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.econ.barnard.columbia.edu/working_papers/wp0501.pdf Revised version, 2006 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.econ.barnard.columbia.edu:80 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
Journal Article: Demand (and supply) in an inter-district public school choice program (2008)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:brn:wpaper:0501

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Barnard College, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Robert O'Connor ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).