IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/11215.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Does Competition Among Public Schools Benefit Students and Taxpayers? A Comment on Hoxby (2000)

Author

Listed:
  • Jesse Rothstein

Abstract

In an influential paper, Hoxby (2000) studies the relationship between the degree of so-called "Tiebout choice" among local school districts within a metropolitan area and average test scores. She argues that choice is endogenous to school quality, and instruments with the number of larger and smaller streams. She finds a large positive effect of choice on test scores, which she interprets as evidence that school choice induces greater school productivity. This paper revisits Hoxby's analysis. I document several important errors in Hoxby's data and code. I also demonstrate that the estimated choice effect is extremely sensitive to the way that "larger streams" are coded. When Hoxby's hand count of larger streams is replaced with any of several alternative, easily replicable measures, there is no significant difference between IV and OLS, each of which indicates a choice effect near zero. There is thus little evidence that schools respond to Tiebout competition by raising productivity.

Suggested Citation

  • Jesse Rothstein, 2005. "Does Competition Among Public Schools Benefit Students and Taxpayers? A Comment on Hoxby (2000)," NBER Working Papers 11215, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:11215
    Note: CH ED
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w11215.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Caroline Hoxby & M. Daniele Paserman, 1998. "Overidentification Tests with Grouped Data," NBER Technical Working Papers 0223, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Davidson, Russell & MacKinnon, James G., 1993. "Estimation and Inference in Econometrics," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780195060119.
    3. Caroline M. Hoxby, 2000. "Does Competition among Public Schools Benefit Students and Taxpayers?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 90(5), pages 1209-1238, December.
    4. Moulton, Brent R., 1986. "Random group effects and the precision of regression estimates," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 32(3), pages 385-397, August.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Lori L. Taylor, 2010. "Competition And Teacher Pay," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 48(3), pages 603-620, July.
    2. Bjerk, David, 2010. "Thieves, thugs, and neighborhood poverty," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 68(3), pages 231-246, November.
    3. repec:mpr:mprres:7443 is not listed on IDEAS
    4. B.D. McCullough & Kerry Anne McGeary & Teresa D. Harrison, 2008. "Do economics journal archives promote replicable research?," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 41(4), pages 1406-1420, November.
    5. Daniel S. Hamermesh, 2007. "Replication in Economics," NBER Working Papers 13026, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    6. Nicholas Bloom & Renata Lemos & Raffaella Sadun & John Van Reenen, 2015. "Does Management Matter in schools?," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 0(584), pages 647-674, May.
    7. Daniel S. Hamermesh, 2007. "Viewpoint: Replication in economics," Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Economics Association, vol. 40(3), pages 715-733, August.
    8. David M. Brasington, 2007. "Public- and Private-School Competition: The Spatial Education Production Function," Springer Books, in: Toichiro Asada & Toshiharu Ishikawa (ed.), Time and Space in Economics, chapter 10, pages 175-203, Springer.
    9. Gallego Francisco, 2013. "When Does Inter-School Competition Matter? Evidence from the Chilean “Voucher” System," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 13(2), pages 525-562, August.
    10. Loeb, Susanna & Valant, Jon & Kasman, Matt, 2011. "Increasing Choice in the Market for Schools: Recent Reforms and Their Effects on Student Achievement," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 64(1), pages 141-163, March.
    11. Oliver Himmler, 2009. "The Effects of School Competition on Academic Achievement and Grading Standards," CESifo Working Paper Series 2676, CESifo.
    12. Joëlle Noailly & Suncica Vujic & Ali Aouragh, 2009. "The effects of competition on the quality of primary schools in the Netherlands," CPB Discussion Paper 120, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
    13. Caroline M. Hoxby, 2005. "Competition Among Public Schools: A Reply to Rothstein (2004)," NBER Working Papers 11216, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    14. Victor Lavy, 2006. "From Forced Busing to Free Choice in Public Schools: Quasi-Experimental Evidence of Individual and General Effects," NBER Working Papers 11969, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Christopher F Baum & Mark E. Schaffer & Steven Stillman, 2003. "Instrumental variables and GMM: Estimation and testing," Stata Journal, StataCorp LP, vol. 3(1), pages 1-31, March.
    2. Jesse Rothstein, 2004. "Does Competition Among Public Schools Benefit Students and Taxpayers? A Comment on Hoxby," Working Papers 10, Princeton University, School of Public and International Affairs, Education Research Section..
    3. Stewart, Hayden & Davis, David E., 2005. "Price Dispersion and Accessibility: A Case study of Fast Food," MPRA Paper 7617, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Jaag, Christian, 2006. "School Competition," MPRA Paper 339, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    5. Akabayashi, Hideo & Araki, Hiroko, 2011. "Do education vouchers prevent dropout at private high schools? Evidence from Japanese policy changes," Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, Elsevier, vol. 25(3), pages 183-198, September.
    6. Mark Schelker & Reiner Eichenberger, 2008. "Rethinking public auditing institutions: Empirical evidence from Swiss municipalities," Working Papers 2008/3, Institut d'Economia de Barcelona (IEB).
    7. Caroline Minter Hoxby, 1994. "Do Private Schools Provide Competition for Public Schools?," NBER Working Papers 4978, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    8. Patrick Kline & Raffaele Saggio & Mikkel Sølvsten, 2020. "Leave‐Out Estimation of Variance Components," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 88(5), pages 1859-1898, September.
    9. Bettinger, Eric P., 2005. "The effect of charter schools on charter students and public schools," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 24(2), pages 133-147, April.
    10. Reza Baqir, 2001. "Government Spending, Legislature Size, and the Executive Veto," IMF Working Papers 2001/208, International Monetary Fund.
    11. Lisa Barrow & Cecilia Elena Rouse, 2000. "Using Market Valuation to Assess the Importance and Efficiency of Public School Spending," Econometric Society World Congress 2000 Contributed Papers 1446, Econometric Society.
    12. Eskeland,Gunnar S. & Filmer,Deon P., 2002. "Autonomy, participation, and learning in Argentine schools - findings and their implications for decentralization," Policy Research Working Paper Series 2766, The World Bank.
    13. Adrien Montalbo, 2020. "Industrial activities and primary schooling in early nineteenth-century France," Cliometrica, Springer;Cliometric Society (Association Francaise de Cliométrie), vol. 14(2), pages 325-365, May.
    14. Baum-Snow, Nathaniel & Ferreira, Fernando, 2015. "Causal Inference in Urban and Regional Economics," Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, in: Gilles Duranton & J. V. Henderson & William C. Strange (ed.), Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, edition 1, volume 5, chapter 0, pages 3-68, Elsevier.
    15. Roland Maude-Griffin & Roger Feldman & Douglas Wholey, 2004. "Nash bargaining model of HMO premiums," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 36(12), pages 1329-1336.
    16. Addison, John T. & Belfield, Clive R., 2007. "Unions, training and firm performance," Zeitschrift für ArbeitsmarktForschung - Journal for Labour Market Research, Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB), Nürnberg [Institute for Employment Research, Nuremberg, Germany], vol. 40(4), pages 361-381.
    17. Aughinbaugh, Alison & Gittleman, Maury, 2004. "Maternal employment and adolescent risky behavior," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 23(4), pages 815-838, July.
    18. Adrien Montalbo, 2018. "Industrial activities and primary schooling in early nineteenth-century France," Working Papers halshs-01826346, HAL.
    19. A. Colin Cameron & Douglas L. Miller, 2010. "Robust Inference with Clustered Data," Working Papers 318, University of California, Davis, Department of Economics.
    20. Caroline M. Hoxby, 2000. "Does Competition among Public Schools Benefit Students and Taxpayers?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 90(5), pages 1209-1238, December.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H7 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations
    • I2 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education
    • R5 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Regional Government Analysis

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:nbr:nberwo:11215. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    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.