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The Three Is of Public Schools: Irrelevant Inputs, Insufficient Resources and Inefficiency

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Henderson, Daniel Simar, Léopold [UCL] Wang, Le

(eng) We examine the educational production function and efficiency of public school districts in Illinois. Using non-parametric kernel methods, we find that most traditional schooling inputs are irrelevant in determining test scores (even in a very general setting). Property tax caps are the only relevant factor that is related to districts’ financial constraints and have predominantly negative associations with test scores. Therefore, insufficient resources may be partially responsible for the lack of growth in test scores. For most other relevant inputs, we find substantial heterogeneity in the returns, which helps reconcile some of the puzzling results in the literature. We further find that there exist inefficiencies in school districts. Moreover, the level of test scores, commonly used as a measure of school effectiveness, (while related) differs substantially from our efficiency scores, and standard parametric approaches drastically underestimate school efficiency. We discuss the policy implications of our results.

Document type Article de périodique (Journal article) – Article de recherche
Access type Accès libre
Publication date 2017
Language Anglais
Journal information "Applied Economics" - Vol. 49, no. 12, p. 1164-1184 (2017)
Peer reviewed yes
Publisher Routledge ((United Kingdom) Abingdon)
issn 0003-6846
e-issn 1466-4283
Publication status Publié
Affiliation UCL - SSH/LIDAM/ISBA - Institut de Statistique, Biostatistique et Sciences Actuarielles
Keywords Educational production function ; irrelevant inputs ; non-parametric kernel ; panel data ; property tax caps ; stochastic frontier analysis ; student achievement ; technical efficiency
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Bibliographic reference Henderson, Daniel ; Simar, Léopold ; Wang, Le. The Three Is of Public Schools: Irrelevant Inputs, Insufficient Resources and Inefficiency. In: Applied Economics, Vol. 49, no. 12, p. 1164-1184 (2017)
Permanent URL http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/175711