Majority Vote on Educational Standards

Robert Schwager

No 6845, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: The direct democratic choice of an examination standard, i.e., a performance level required to graduate, is evaluated against a utilitarian welfare function. It is shown that the median preferred standard is inefficiently low if the marginal cost of reaching a higher performance reacts more sensitively to ability for high than for low abilities, and if the right tail of the ability distribution is longer than the left tail. Moreover, a high number of agents who choose not to graduate may imply that the median preferred standard is inefficiently low even if these conditions fail.

Keywords: examination; school; drop-outs; democracy; median voter (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 I21 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic and nep-pol
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