IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/regeco/v109y2024ics0166046224000887.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Rational cuts? The local impact of closing undersized schools

Author

Listed:
  • Di Cataldo, Marco
  • Romani, Giulia

Abstract

The availability of public education services can influence residential choices. Therefore, policies aimed at ‘rationalising’ service provision by reducing the number of undersized nodes in the public school network can lead to population decline, especially in spatially isolated areas lacking valid alternatives to the removed services. This paper examines the demographic and income effects of primary school closures by exploiting an Italian education reform that resulted in the contraction of the school network. We assess whether school closures impact households’ residential choices, over and above preexisting negative population trends that motivate school closures. Our findings indicate that municipalities affected by school closures experience significant reductions in population and income. The effect is primarily driven by peripheral municipalities located far away from economic centres and distant from the next available primary school. This evidence indicates that school ‘rationalisation policies’, by fostering depopulation of peripheral areas, have an influence on the spatial distribution of households and income, thus affecting territorial disparities.

Suggested Citation

  • Di Cataldo, Marco & Romani, Giulia, 2024. "Rational cuts? The local impact of closing undersized schools," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 109(C).
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:regeco:v:109:y:2024:i:c:s0166046224000887
    DOI: 10.1016/j.regsciurbeco.2024.104057
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166046224000887
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.regsciurbeco.2024.104057?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    School closures; Residential choices; Education policy; Core–periphery patterns; Italy;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H40 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - General
    • H52 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Government Expenditures and Education
    • R23 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Household Analysis - - - Regional Migration; Regional Labor Markets; Population

    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:eee:regeco:v:109:y:2024:i:c:s0166046224000887. 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: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/regec .

    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.