School Vouchers Italian Style

Giorgio Brunello and Daniele Checchi

Giornale degli Economisti, 2004, vol. 63, issue 3-4, 357-399

Abstract: School vouchers introduced recently in some Italian regions have lowered the cost of private schools. On the one hand, we provide evidence that Italian private schools may be selected for different reasons other than quality considerations. On the other hand, by exploiting individual data on voucher applicants, we present evidence that the percentage of voucher applicants is higher, the higher the average quality of private schools. We explain this with the fact that better quality schools provide better services to students, including information and consulting on vouchers. We show that enrolment in private schools responds sluggishly to changes in tuition induced by vouchers. Under stringent assumptions, we estimate the slopes of supply and demand of private education in the largest Italian region, Lombardy, during the first two years since implementation of a voucher scheme, and provide a quantitative assessment of the long-term impact of vouchers on tuition fees and enrolment in private schools.

Keywords: school choice; vouchers; private school (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://ftp.gde.unibocconi.it/gde_articles/2004/GDE_V63_N3-4_P357-399.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: School Vouchers Italian Style (2005)
Working Paper: School vouchers Italian style (2005)
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:gde:journl:gde_v63_n3-4_p357-399

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.gde.unibocconi.it

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Giornale degli Economisti from GDE (Giornale degli Economisti e Annali di Economia), Bocconi University via Sarfatti, 25 - 20136 Milano (Italy).
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Erika Somma ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).