Does Market Structure Affect the Conduct and Performance of Educational Institutions?

9511343霍克斯比这个项目对教育经济学中的三个主题进行了实证研究。该项目的第一部分利用学区内队列规模的自然变化来分析班级规模对学生表现的影响，以此方式避免了对现有文献中关于学校投入生产率的许多批评。该项目的第二部分以新的方向扩展了关于学校财政集中对一个州的公立学校人均支出的影响的大量文献。这个项目考察了集中化对学校生产力的影响，即学生的表现和每个学生的投入。这一新的研究路线是及时和重要的，因为从1972-92年间，36个州在某种程度上集中了学校的资金，其中12个是通过法院命令进行的。该项目的第三部分也是最后一部分研究了全国性大学市场的出现--学校吸引了来自全国各地或几个州的地区的学生--如何影响特定学生就读的大学的特点，以及学生S大学学位的价值。以学校为基础的关于学生大小影响的结果通常会遇到一个被忽略的变量问题：学生和教师的比例是内生的，是未被观察到的学生特征。基于汇总(全州范围)数据的结果具有站不住脚的识别限制，并受到汇总偏差的影响。该项目的第一部分利用了这样一个事实，即人口在25,000人以下的学区在队列规模上每年都有自然的变化。由于教师是相对不可分割和特定年级的，学校不能完美地重新分配资源，以便在不同规模的群体之间平衡班级规模。该策略使用了康涅狄格州学区的面板数据，并使用了随着队列规模的变化而在后续队列之间改变班级规模的工具。该项目的第二部分分析了最近(1977-87)在国家层面上增加学校财政集中度的16项改革。对于每个地区，政府普查数据被用来对改革导致的地方学校边际支出的税收价格变化进行分类。对于在各自州达到最高支出水平的地区，这些措施从没有变化到极大的增加不等。该项目开发并经验性地测试了一个模型，在该模型中，地方学校支出的高税收价格降低了学校生产率(学生的投入表现)，因为它削弱了生产率较低的学校提高生产率的机制。

9511343 Hoxby This project empirically examines three topics in the economics of education. The first part of the project employs natural variation in cohort size within school districts to analyze the effects of class size on student performance in this way avoiding many criticisms of the existing literature on the productivity of school inputs. The second part of the project extends a substantial literature on the effects of school finance centralizations on average public school per-pupil spending in a state in a new direction. This project examines the effect of centralization on school productivity, or student performance and per-pupil inputs. This new line of research is timely and important because from 1972-92, 36 states centralized school finance to some degree, twelve by court order. The third and final part of the project studies how the emergence of a national college market, with schools drawing students from across the nation or within a several-state region, affects the characteristics of the college attended by a given student and the value of the student s college degree. School-based results on the effects of alass size typically suffer from an omitted variables problem: the student-teacher ratio is endogenous to unobserved student characteristics. Results based on aggregate (state-wide) data have untenable identifying restrictions and suffer from aggregation bias. The first part of this project makes use of the fact that school districts with populations under 25,000 have natural year-to-year variation in cohort size. Because teachers are relatively indivisible and grade-specific, schools cannot perfectly re- allocate resources so as to equalize class sizes between different sized cohorts. The strategy uses panel data on Connecticut school districts, and instruments for the change in class size between succeeding cohorts with the change in cohort size. The second part of the project analyzes sixteen recent (1977-87) reforms th at increase school finance centralization at the state level. For each district, Census of Governments data are used to categorize the change in the tax-price of marginal local school spending as a result of the reform. These vary from no change to extremely large increases in the case of districts that have reached maximum spending levels in their states. The project develops and tests empirically a model in which a high tax-price of local school spending decreases school productivity (student performance for inputs) because it weakens mechanisms by which less productive schools are made more productive.