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

这个项目实证地考察了教育经济学中的三个主题。该项目的第一部分采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，以这种方式避免了对现有文献中关于学校投入生产力的许多批评。该项目的第二部分在一个新的方向上扩展了大量关于学校财政集中对州内公立学校人均支出的影响的文献。该项目考察了集中化对学校生产力或学生表现和每个学生投入的影响。这项新的研究是及时而重要的，因为从1972年到1992年，36个州在某种程度上集中了学校财政，其中12个州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，研究了全国大学市场的出现，即学校从全国各地或几个州的地区吸引学生，如何影响特定学生就读的大学的特征和学生大学学位的价值。以学校为基础的班级规模影响的结果通常受到遗漏变量问题的影响：学生与教师的比例是内生的，无法观察到学生的特征。基于汇总（全州）数据的结果具有站不住脚的识别限制，并且存在汇总偏差。这个项目的第一部分利用了这样一个事实，即人口在25,000以下的学区在队列规模上每年都有自然的变化。由于教师相对来说是不可分割的，而且是按年级划分的，所以学校无法完美地重新分配资源，从而在不同规模的班级之间平衡班级规模。该策略使用康涅狄格学区的面板数据，以及随队列规模变化的后续队列之间班级规模变化的工具。该项目的第二部分分析了最近（1977-87）的16项改革，这些改革在州一级增加了学校财政的集中化。对于每个地区，政府普查数据被用来对改革导致的边际当地学校支出的税收价格变化进行分类。这些变化从没有变化到非常大的增长，这些地区已经达到了他们州的最高支出水平。该项目开发并实证检验了一个模型，在该模型中，地方学校支出的高税收价格降低了学校的生产力（投入的学生表现），因为它削弱了使生产力较低的学校提高生产力的机制。

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.