IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/red/sed004/260.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Smaller Schools or Longer Bus Rides? Returns to Scale and School Choice

Author

Listed:
  • Margaret Ledyard

Abstract

School choice programs, such as vouchers or charter schools, offer parents an alternative to traditional public schools, while removing students from traditional public schools. If there are returns to scale in education, a major exodus of students from public schools could increase the average cost of students left behind. This paper uses a structural model to estimate the magnitudes of the scale economies, and then uses these estimates to simulate the increase in average cost in the public schools from a choice program. Depending on the assumptions made, the long run increase in average cost of a student who remains in public school is on the order of $500

Suggested Citation

  • Margaret Ledyard, 2004. "Smaller Schools or Longer Bus Rides? Returns to Scale and School Choice," 2004 Meeting Papers 260, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    • Handle: RePEc:red:sed004:260
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.econ.umn.edu/~mledyard/papers/ledyard_jobmkt.pdf
    File Function: main text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    economics of education; increasing returns;

    JEL classification:

    • I22 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Educational Finance; Financial Aid
    • I28 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Government Policy

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:red:sed004:260. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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 RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Christian Zimmermann (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sedddea.html .

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.