Competition and Public School Efficiency in Sweden

Staffan Waldo ()
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Staffan Waldo: Swedish Institute for Food and Agricultural Economics, Postal: Swedish Institute for Food and Agricultural Economics, PO box 730, S-220 07 Lund, Sweden

No 2006:7, Working Papers from Lund University, Department of Economics

Abstract: The focus in this study is on how efficiency in public education is affected by competition from private schools. The Swedish educational system is used, since the Swedish large scale voucher program implies that private and public schools compete on similar terms. In 2002 approximately 5% of the Swedish children attended private schools, and the share is rapidly increasing. Public school efficiency is estimated using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Modelling education is difficult since educational production is not only dependent on factors under control of the school management, but also on the students’ socio-economic backgrounds. A number of approaches have been proposed concerning how to model this in a DEA setting. In this study, four different approaches are used and compared. Special focus is put on a second stage regression, where the efficiency estimates are regressed on competition and other explanatory variables. We can not show that the share of children attending private schools is related to public school performance.

Keywords: Data Envelopment Analysis; competition; education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H73 I21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2006-03-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-eec, nep-eff, nep-hrm, nep-pbe and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:lunewp:2006_007

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