Could Do Better: The Effectiveness of Incentives and Competition in Schools

Gianni De Fraja () and Pedro Landeras

Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of York

Abstract: This paper studies the effects of incentive mechanisms and of the competitive environment on the interaction between schools and students, in a set-up where their effort affects the students' educational attainment. We show that increasing the power of the incentive scheme and the effectiveness of competition may have the counterintuitive effect of lowering the students' attainment. In a simple dynamic set-up, where the reputation of the schools affects recruitment, and we show that increased competition leads to segregation of pupils by ability.

Keywords: students effort; schools quality; incentives in education; competition between schools; quasi-markets. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 H42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-ure
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/econ/documents/dp/0211.pdf Main text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Could do Better: The Effectiveness of Incentives and Competition in Schools (2004)
Journal Article: Could do better: The effectiveness of incentives and competition in schools (2006)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:yor:yorken:02/11

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of York
Address: Department of Economics and Related Studies, University of York, York, YO10 5DD, United Kingdom
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Michael Shallcross ().