IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ebl/ecbull/eb-02aa0010.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

An Economic Case against Vouchers: Why Local Public Schools Are a Local Public Good

Author

Listed:
  • William Fischel

    (Dartmouth College)

Abstract

Statewide voucher plans are consistently rejected in plebiscites. This article explains voters' attachment to public education despite the schools' deficiencies: The public benefit of local schools accrues to parents, not children. Having children in a local school enables adults to get to know other adults better, which in turn reduces the transaction costs of citizen provision of true local public goods. This network of adult acquaintances within the municipality is "community-specific social capital." Vouchers would disperse students from their communities and thereby reduce the communal capital of residents. Voters' implicit understanding of this causes them to reject large-scale voucher plans.

Suggested Citation

  • William Fischel, 2002. "An Economic Case against Vouchers: Why Local Public Schools Are a Local Public Good," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 28(7), pages 1.
    • Handle: RePEc:ebl:ecbull:eb-02aa0010
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.accessecon.com/pubs/EB/2002/Volume28/EB-02AA0010A.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Thomas Dee, 2005. "The Effects of Catholic Schooling on Civic Participation," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 12(5), pages 605-625, September.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H7 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations
    • I2 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ebl:ecbull:eb-02aa0010. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: John P. Conley (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.