Advanced Search
MyIDEAS: Login

Does Additional Spending Help Urban Schools? An Evaluation Using Boundary Discontinuities

Contents:

Author Info

  • Stephen Gibbons
  • Sandra McNally
  • Martina Viarengo

Abstract

Improvement of educational attainment in schools in urban, disadvantaged areas is an important priority for policy - particularly in countries like England which have a long tail at the bottom of the educational distribution and where there is much concern about low social mobility. An anomaly in the spatial dimension of school funding policy in England allows us to examine the effect of increasing school expenditure for schools in urban areas. This anomaly arises because an 'area cost adjustment' is made in how central government allocates funds to Local Authorities (school districts) whereas, in reality, teachers are drawn from the same labour market and are paid according to national pay scales. This is one of the features that give rise to neighbouring schools on either side of a Local Authority boundary being allocated very different resources, even if they have very similar characteristics. We find that these funding disparities give rise to sizeable differences in pupil attainment in national tests at the end of primary school. This finding lends adds to the evidence that school resources have an important role to play in improving educational attainment and has direct policy implications for the current 'pupil premium' policy in England.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
File URL: http://www.spatialeconomics.ac.uk/textonly/serc/publications/download/sercdp0090.pdf
Download Restriction: no

Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by Spatial Economics Research Centre, LSE in its series SERC Discussion Papers with number 0090.

as in new window
Length:
Date of creation: Aug 2011
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:cep:sercdp:0090

Contact details of provider:
Web page: http://www.spatialeconomics.ac.uk/SERC/publications/default.asp

Related research

Keywords: Urban schools; education; resources;

Other versions of this item:

Find related papers by JEL classification:

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

References

References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
as in new window
  1. Eric A. Hanushek & John F. Kain & Steven G. Rivkin, 1998. "Teachers, Schools, and Academic Achievement," NBER Working Papers 6691, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  2. Gilles Duranton & Laurent Gobillon & Henry Overman, 2006. "Assessing the Effects of Local Taxation Using Microgeographic Data," CEP Discussion Papers dp0748, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
  3. Stephen Machin & Sandra McNally & Costas Meghir, 2007. "Resources and Standards in Urban Schools," CEE Discussion Papers 0076, Centre for the Economics of Education, LSE.
  4. Sandra E. Black, 1997. "Do better schools matter? Parental valuation of elementary education," Research Paper 9729, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
  5. Holmlund, Helena & McNally, Sandra & Viarengo, Martina, 2010. "Does money matter for schools?," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 29(6), pages 1154-1164, December.
  6. Patrick Bayer & Fernando Ferreira & Robert McMillan, 2007. "A Unified Framework for Measuring Preferences for Schools and Neighborhoods," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 115(4), pages 588-638, 08.
  7. Jonathan Guryan, 2001. "Does Money Matter? Regression-Discontinuity Estimates from Education Finance Reform in Massachusetts," NBER Working Papers 8269, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  8. Cushing, Brian J., 1984. "Capitalization of interjurisdictional fiscal differentials: An alternative approach," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 15(3), pages 317-326, May.
  9. Jo Blanden, 2009. "How Much Can We Learn from International Comparisons of Intergenerational Mobility?," CEE Discussion Papers 0111, Centre for the Economics of Education, LSE.
  10. Hills, John & Brewer, Mike & Jenkins, Stephen P & Lister, Ruth & Lupton, Ruth & Machin, Stephen & Mills, Colin & Modood, Tariq & Rees, Teresa & Riddell, Sheila, 2010. "An anatomy of economic inequality in the UK: report of the National Equality Panel," Open Access publications from London School of Economics and Political Science 60, London School of Economics and Political Science.
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 in new window

Cited by:
  1. Stephen Machin & Sandra McNally, 2012. "The Evaluation of English Education Policies," National Institute Economic Review, National Institute of Economic and Social Research, vol. 219(1), pages R15-R25, January.
  2. repec:ese:iserwp:2012-13 is not listed on IDEAS
  3. Steve Gibbons & Henry G. Overman, 2010. "Mostly Pointless Spatial Econometrics?," SERC Discussion Papers 0061, Spatial Economics Research Centre, LSE.
  4. Cheti Nicoletti & Birgitta Rabe, 2012. "The effect of school resources on test scores in England," Discussion Papers 12/19, Department of Economics, University of York.
  5. Monique De Haan, 2012. "The Effect of Additional Funds for Low-Ability Pupils - A Nonparametric Bounds Analysis," CESifo Working Paper Series 3993, CESifo Group Munich.

Lists

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cep:sercdp:0090

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ().

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 references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link 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 profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.