When does Inter-School Competition Matter? Evidence from the Chilean ‘Voucher’ System

• Francisco A. Gallego ^[1]
  1. [1] Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

     Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

     Santiago, Chile

     
• Localización: Documentos de Trabajo ( Instituto de Economía PUC ), ISSN-e 0717-7593, Nº. 429, 2012, págs. 1-35
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • I investigate the e ects of voucher-school competition on educational outcomes. I test whether voucher-school competition 1) improves student outcomes and 2) has stronger e ects when public schools face a hard budget constraint. Since both voucher school competition and the degree of hardness of the budget constraint for public schools are endogenous to public school quality, I exploit (i) the interaction of the number of Catholic priests in 1950 and the institution of the voucher system in Chile in 1981 as a potentially exogenous determinant of the supply of voucher schools and (ii) a particular feature of the electoral system that a ects the identity of the mayors of di erent counties (who manage public schools) as a source of exogenous variation in the degree of hardness of the public schools budget constraints. Using this information, I nd that: 1) an increase of one standard deviation of the ratio of voucher-to-public schools increases tests scores by just around 0.10 standard deviations; and 2) the e ects are signi cantly bigger for public schools facing more binding minimum enrollment levels.