Advanced Search
MyIDEAS: Login

Can Increasing Private School Participation and Monetary Loss in a Voucher Program Affect Public School Performance? Evidence from Milwaukee

Contents:

Author Info

  • Rajashri Chakrabarti

    (Harvard University)

Abstract

The Milwaukee voucher program, as implemented in 1990, allowed only non- sectarian private schools to participate in the program. Following a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling, the program saw a major shift and entered into its second phase, when religious private schools were allowed to participate for the first time in 1998. This led to more than a three-fold increase in the number of private schools and almost a four-fold increase in the number of choice students. Moreover, due to some changes in funding provisions, the revenue loss per student from vouchers increased in the second phase of the program. This paper analyzes, both theoretically and empirically, the impacts of these changes on public school performance in Milwaukee. It argues that voucher design matters and that the choice of parameters in a voucher program is crucial as far as impacts on public school incentives and performance are concerned. In the context of a theoretical model of public school and household behavior, the paper establishes that the policy changes will lead to an improvement of the public schools in the second phase of the program as compared to the first phase. Following Hoxby (2003a, 2003b) in treatment-control group classification, using data from 1987 to 2002, and a difference-in-differences estimation strategy in trends, the paper then shows that the theoretical prediction is validated empirically. This result is robust to alternative samples and specifications, and survive robustness checks including correcting for mean reversion.

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://128.118.178.162/eps/pe/papers/0512/0512003.pdf
Download Restriction: no

Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by EconWPA in its series Public Economics with number 0512003.

as in new window
Length: 63 pages
Date of creation: 02 Dec 2005
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:wpa:wuwppe:0512003

Note: Type of Document - pdf; pages: 63
Contact details of provider:
Web page: http://128.118.178.162

Related research

Keywords: Vouchers; Public School Performance; Competition; Mean Reversion;

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. Caroline M. Hoxby, 2002. "School Choice and School Productivity (or Could School Choice be a Tide that Lifts All Boats?)," NBER Working Papers 8873, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  2. Chang-Tai Hsieh & Miguel Urquiola, 2002. "When Schools Compete, How Do They Compete? An Assessment of Chile’s Nationwide School Voucher Program," Working Papers 123, Princeton University, Department of Economics, Center for Economic Policy Studies..
  3. Manski, Charles F., 1992. "Educational choice (vouchers) and social mobility," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 11(4), pages 351-369, December.
  4. Kenneth Y. Chay & Patrick J. McEwan & Miguel Urquiola, 2003. "The Central Role of Noise in Evaluating Interventions that Use Test Scores to Rank Schools," NBER Working Papers 10118, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  5. Rajashri Chakrabarti, 2004. "Impact of Voucher Design on Public School Performance: Evidence from Florida and Milwaukee Voucher Programs," Econometric Society 2004 North American Summer Meetings 221, Econometric Society.
  6. Elizabeth M. Caucutt, 2002. "Educational Vouchers When There Are Peer Group Effects--Size Matters," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 43(1), pages 195-222, February.
  7. Rajashri Chakrabarti, 2005. "Can Increasing Private School Participation and Monetary Loss in a Voucher Program Affect Public School Performance? Evidence from Milwaukee," Public Economics 0512003, EconWPA.
  8. Dennis Epple & Richard Romano, 2002. "Educational Vouchers and Cream Skimming," NBER Working Papers 9354, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  9. McMillan, Robert, 2004. "Competition, incentives, and public school productivity," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 88(9-10), pages 1871-1892, August.
  10. Thomas J. Nechyba, 1996. "Public School Finance in a General Equilibrium Tiebout World: Equalization Programs, Peer Effects and Private School Vouchers," NBER Working Papers 5642, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  11. Caroline Minter Hoxby, 2003. "School Choice and School Productivity. Could School Choice Be a Tide that Lifts All Boats?," NBER Chapters, in: The Economics of School Choice, pages 287-342 National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  12. West, Martin R. & Peterson, Paul E., 2005. "The Efficacy of Choice Threats within School Accountability Systems: Results from Legislatively Induced Experiments," Working Paper Series rwp05-033, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
  13. Thomas J. Nechyba, 2000. "Mobility, Targeting, and Private-School Vouchers," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 90(1), pages 130-146, March.
  14. Thomas J. Nechyba, 2003. "Introducing School Choice into Multidistrict Public School Systems," NBER Chapters, in: The Economics of School Choice, pages 145-194 National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  15. Epple, Dennis & Romano, Richard E, 1998. "Competition between Private and Public Schools, Vouchers, and Peer-Group Effects," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 88(1), pages 33-62, March.
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. Welsch, David M. & Statz, Bambi & Skidmore, Mark, 2010. "An examination of inter-district public school transfers in Wisconsin," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 29(1), pages 126-137, February.
  2. Rajashri Chakrabarti, 2011. "Vouchers, responses, and the test-taking population: regression discontinuity evidence from Florida," Staff Reports 486, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
  3. Rajashri Chakrabarti, 2007. "Vouchers, public school response, and the role of incentives: evidence from Florida," Staff Reports 306, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
  4. Rajashri Chakrabarti, 2005. "Can Increasing Private School Participation and Monetary Loss in a Voucher Program Affect Public School Performance? Evidence from Milwaukee," Public Economics 0512003, EconWPA.
  5. Anders Böhlmark & Mikael Lindahl, 2012. "Independent Schools and Long-Run Educational Outcomes - Evidence from Sweden's Large Scale Voucher Reform," CESifo Working Paper Series 3866, CESifo Group Munich.
  6. Piolatto, Amedeo, 2008. "Publicly provided private goods: education and selective vouchers," MPRA Paper 8934, University Library of Munich, Germany.
  7. Cesur, Resul & Tekin, Erdal & Ulker, Aydogan, 2013. "Air Pollution and Infant Mortality: Evidence from the Expansion of Natural Gas Infrastructure," IZA Discussion Papers 7179, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
  8. Nirav Mehta, 2012. "Competition in Public School Districts: Charter School Entry, Student Sorting, and School Input Determination," University of Western Ontario, CIBC Centre for Human Capital and Productivity Working Papers 20123, University of Western Ontario, CIBC Centre for Human Capital and Productivity.
  9. Maria Marta Ferreyra, 2009. "Contracting for Educational Achievement," 2009 Meeting Papers 850, Society for Economic Dynamics.
  10. Rajashri Chakrabarti, 2008. "Impact of voucher design on public school performance: evidence from Florida and Milwaukee voucher programs," Staff Reports 315, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
  11. Lamarche, Carlos, 2011. "Measuring the incentives to learn in Colombia using new quantile regression approaches," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 96(2), pages 278-288, November.
  12. Will Dobbie & Roland G. Fryer, Jr, 2011. "Getting Beneath the Veil of Effective Schools: Evidence from New York City," NBER Working Papers 17632, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  13. Rajashri Chakrabarti, 2011. "Incentives and responses under No Child Left Behind: credible threats and the role of competition," Staff Reports 525, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

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:wpa:wuwppe:0512003

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

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.