School district consolidation: Market concentration and the scale-efficiency tradeoff
School district consolidation: Market concentration and the scale-efficiency tradeoff
复制标题
学区整合：市场集中度和规模效率权衡
DOI：
10.1002/soej.12029
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发表时间：
2015
影响因子：
1.9
通讯作者：
L. Taylor
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
T. Gronberg;Dennis W. Jansen;M. Karakaplan;L. Taylor
合并经常被提议作为一种在不增加教育经费的情况下提高学区质量的战略。然而，如果合并减少了当地学校市场的竞争，降低了效率，那么利用规模经济所节省的任何费用都可能被效率的提高所抵消。我们使用一个随机成本函数来调查这些影响在得克萨斯州的地区。我们发现重要的规模经济，但我们也发现，市场集中度的提高导致成本效率提高。最后，我们说明了这两个潜在的抵消因素的实际重要性，在一个模拟，考虑巩固得克萨斯州学区县级区。我们发现，如果不考虑对竞争的影响，可能会导致大大高估的合并的好处。
Consolidation is often proposed as a strategy for increasing school district quality without increasing educational funding. However, if consolidation reduces competition in the local school market and reduces efficiency, any savings from exploiting economies of scale may be lost to increased inefficiency. We use a stochastic cost function to investigate these effects for districts in Texas. We find important economies of scale, but we also find that increased market concentration leads to increased cost inefficiency. Finally, we illustrate the practical importance of these two potentially offsetting factors in a simulation that considers consolidating Texas school districts to county-level districts. We find that failure to consider the effect on competition can lead to large overestimates of the benefits of consolidation.