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| Publications [#324983] of Thomas J. Nechyba
Other
- Nechyba, TJ. "Introducing School Choice into Multi-District Public School Systems." The Economics of School Choice. Edited
by Caroline Hoxby. ( 2002.).
Abstract:
Predicting the impact of school finance and school choice policies is
complicated in large part because of the multitude of household
choices that are simultaneously influenced within a general
equilibrium setting. Parents choose which neighborhoods in which
school districts to reside in, which schools - public or private - to
send their children to, and how to participate in political process
that affects education policies. As a result of these choices,
property values and therefore budget sets change as different
policies are introduced, and the nature of schools changes as inputs
- including different mixes of children and parents - change.
Furthermore, school administrators in both private and public schools
may change their behavior under different institutional arrangements.
The purpose of this paper is therefore to shed light on how school
choice policies change opportunities faced by different types of
households and their children as the general equilibrium forces
unfold.
The analysis employs general equilibrium simulations to accomplish
this. These simulations are derived from a three-district model of
low, middle and high-income school districts (calibrated to New York
data) with housing stocks that vary within and across districts. The
advantage of this approach is that, rather than starting from an
abstract and idealized public school system, it allows the analysis
to proceed from a base model that replicates the actual stylized
facts that emerge from the data - including public school systems
with wide inter-district variations of school quality, communities
with housing stocks similar to those observed in the data, etc.
Furthermore, the data are used to infer specific parameters in
behavioral equations, parameters that are consistent with the present
state of the world. Policies then unfold in the model under the
assumptions that household responses will be consistent with these
parameters. Previous analysis conducted with this model has yielded a
variety of insights regarding the impact of various public school
finance systems, the potential role of peer effects, and the likely
role of different types of voucher policies. This analysis with
respect to school choice is extended in this paper by considering
potential school responses to increased competition as well as
deriving testable implications regarding families that differ in
income and in the number of children in the household.
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