School Competition and Efficiency with Publicly Funded Catholic Schools

David Card, Martin Dooley () and A. Payne

No 14176, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: The province of Ontario has two publicly funded school systems: secular schools (known as public schools) that are open to all students, and separate schools that are open to children with Catholic backgrounds. The systems are administered independently and receive equal funding per student. In this paper we use detailed school and student-level data to assess whether competition between the systems leads to improved efficiency. Building on a simple model of school choice, we argue that incentives for effort will be greater in areas where there are more Catholic families, and where these families are less committed to a particular system. To measure the local determinants of cross-system competition we study the effects of school openings on enrollment growth at nearby elementary schools. We find significant cross-system responses to school openings, with a magnitude that is proportional to the fraction of Catholics in the area, and is higher in more rapidly growing areas. We then test whether schools that face greater cross-system competition have higher productivity, as measured by test score gains between 3rd and 6th grade. We estimate a statistically significant but modest-sized impact of potential competition on the growth rate of student achievement. The estimates suggest that extending competition to all students would raise average test scores in 6th grade by 6-8% of a standard deviation.

JEL-codes: I21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-eff and nep-ure
Note: ED LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (38)

Published as David Card & Martin D. Dooley & A. Abigail Payne, 2010. "School Competition and Efficiency with Publicly Funded Catholic Schools," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 2(4), pages 150-76, October.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14176.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: School Competition and Efficiency with Publicly Funded Catholic Schools (2010)
Working Paper: School Competition and Efficiency with Publicly Funded Catholic Schools (2010)
Working Paper: School Competition and Efficiency with Publicly Funded Catholic Schools (2010)
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:nbr:nberwo:14176

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14176

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().