Majority Vote on Educational Standards

Robert Schwager
Additional contact information
Robert Schwager: Georg-August University, Göttingen, Germany

No 2013-11, GEMF Working Papers from GEMF, Faculty of Economics, University of Coimbra

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)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2013-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-pol and nep-ure
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://repec.uc.pt/gmf/wpaper/wpgemf/gemf_2013-11.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:gmf:wpaper:2013-11.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in GEMF Working Papers from GEMF, Faculty of Economics, University of Coimbra Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sofia Antunes (ceber@uc.pt).