Does School Privatization Improve Educational Achievement? Evidence from Sweden's Voucher Reform

This paper evaluates general achievement effects of choice and competition between private and public schools at the nine-year school level by assessing a radical voucher reform that was implemented in Sweden in 1992. Starting from a situation where the public schools essentially were monopolists on all local school markets, the degree of privatization has developed very differently across municipalities over time as a result of this reform. We estimate the impact of an increase in private enrolment on short, medium and long-term educational outcomes of all pupils using within-municipality variation over time, and control for differential pre-reform and concurrent municipality trends. We find that an increase in the private school share moderately improves short-term educational outcomes such as 9th-grade GPA and the fraction of students who choose an academic high school track. However, we do not find any impact on medium or long-term educational outcomes such as high school GPA, university attainment or years of schooling. We conclude that the first-order short-term effect is too small to yield lasting positive effects.private schooling, choice, competition, educational achievement

What More Than Parental Income? An Exploration of What Swedish Siblings Get from Their Parents

Sibling correlations are used as overall measures of the impact of family background and community influences on individual outcomes. While most correlation studies show that siblings are quite similar in terms of future achievement, we lack specific knowledge of what it is about family background that really matters. Studies on intergenerational income mobility show that parental income matters to some extent, but they also show that more than half of the family background and community influences that siblings share are not even correlated with parental income. In this paper, we employ a data set that contains rich information about families in order to explore what factors in addition to parental income can explain why siblings tend to have such similar outcomes. Our results show that measures of family structure and social problems account for very little of sibling similarities in adult income above and beyond that already accounted for by parental income. However, when we add a set of indicators for parental involvement and attitudes, the explanatory power of all our variables increased from about a third (using only traditional indicators of socio-economic status) to just over half. Interestingly, indicators of parents' patience, i.e., propensity to plan ahead and willingness to postpone benefits to the future, are particularly important.family background, intergenerational mobility, parents, siblings, long-run income

Ein Jahr später : Die NPD seit der Einstellung des Verbotsprozesses durch das BVG am 18. März 2003

Vor einem Jahr, am 18. März 2003, entschied das Bundesverfassungsgericht, den Verbotsprozess gegen die rechtsextremistische NPD einzustellen. Zwar wurde in der Sache, dem Nachweis der neonazistischen Betätigung dieser Partei, ihrer gegen die verfassungsmäßige Ordnung im Sinne des Grundgesetzes gerichteten Aktivitäten überhaupt nicht verhandelt, ihr also kein genereller Freibrief ausgestellt, doch versuchten ihre Führer natürlich sofort, die Niederlage der Antragsteller (Bundesregierung, Bundestag, Bundesrat) als großen Sieg der nationalistischen Kräfte hinzustellen und eine neue Offensive der Volksverhetzung und provokatorischer Aktionen zu starten

Does school privatization improve educational achievement? Evidence from Sweden's voucher reform

This paper evaluates general achievement effects of choice and competition between private and public schools at the nine-year school level by assessing a radical voucher reform that was implemented in Sweden in 1992. Starting from a situation where the public schools essentially were monopolists on all local school markets, the degree of privatization has developed very differently across municipalities over time as a result of this reform. We estimate the impact of an increase in private enrolment on short, medium and long-term educational outcomes of all pupils using within-municipality variation over time, and control for differential pre-reform and concurrent municipality trends. We find that an increase in the private school share moderately improves short-term educational outcomes such as 9th-grade GPA and the fraction of students who choose an academic high school track. However, we do not find any impact on medium or long-term educational outcomes such as high school GPA, university attainment or years of schooling. We conclude that the first-order short-term effect is too small to yield lasting positive effects

The impact of school choice on pupil achievement, segregation and costs: Swedish evidence

This paper evaluates school choice at the compulsory-school level by assessing a reform implemented in Sweden in 1992, which opened up for publicly funded but privately operated schools. In many local school markets, this reform led to a significant increase in the quantity of such schools as well as in the share of pupils attending them. We estimate the impact of this increase in private enrolment on the average achievement of all pupils using within-municipality variation over time, and controlling for differential pre-reform municipality trends. We find that an increase in the private-school share by 10 percentage points increases average pupil achievement by almost 1 percentile rank point. We show that this total effect can be interpreted as the sum of a private-school attendance effect and a competition effect. The former effect, which is identified using variation in school choice among siblings, is found to be only a small part of the total effect. This suggests that the main part of the achievement effect is due to more competition in the school sector, forcing schools to improve their quality. We use grade point average as outcome variable. A comparison with test data suggests that our results are not driven by differential grade-setting standards in private and public schools. We further find that more competition from private schools increases school costs. There is also some evidence of sorting of pupils along socioeconomic and ethnic lines

Optimising Archaeologic Ceramics XRF Analyses

We present the first results of an experiment which is aimed at ultimately producing recommendations for analysing archaeologic ceramics specimens using hand held XRF analysis devices. In the experiment we study the effects of different measurement durations, different number of measured points, and three different types of surface treatments (breakage, polished, grounded) when analysing ceramics specimens, while controlling for nine different types of clay and three different types of temper (no temper, sand, rock), in total almost 1000 analysed points. For each measurement, the proportions of 36 different elements and all other elements are estimated. In those cases with multiple measurements of a specimen, the compositional centre of the measurements is calculated. A complicating issue in the analysis is the large number of parts found to be below detection limit; 13 elements have more than 50 % of the measurements below detection limit and for more than half of those (almost) all measurements are below detection limit. We try nine different strategies for imputing the values. Each estimated elemental composition is compared to a reference estimate using the simplicial distance. The log distances are finally analysed using analysis of variance with main and interaction effects. We find that the different surface treatments have the greatest effect on the distances: grounded specimens yield the most accurate estimates and polished surfaces the least. We also find a significant effect of increasing the number of measured points, but less effect of increasing the duration of the measurements

Ceramics and change. An overview of pottery production

In southern African Iron Age studies, there are few attempts to systematically apply and include laboratory analyses when studying archaeological ceramic materials. As demonstrated in this paper, such analyses help to understand technological aspects such as raw materials, manufacturing techniques and vessel function. Combined with vessel shape and decoration as well as ethnographic studies the results provide new ways to understand local and regional distribution networks of the ceramics craft. Furthermore, laboratory analyses are most useful when studying continuity and changes in the ceramics handicraft over time, which has implications both on cultural and social change as seen in the shift in ceramic production techniques. We use examples from Zimbabwe and South Africa to illustrate these changes, and discuss them in a broader social and technological context in Iron Age southern Africa

School choice and segregation: Evidence from Sweden

This paper studies the evolution of school segregation in Sweden in the aftermath of the 1992 universal school voucher reform, which spurred the establishment of new independent voucher schools and introduced parental choice. The empirical analysis assesses the relative importance of neighbourhood sorting, parental choice and the location of independent schools for school segregation. In particular, it exploits variation in school choice opportunities across municipalities, and provides descriptive evidence that in regions where school choice has become more prevalent, school segregation between immigrants and natives, and between children of high/low educated parents, has increased more than in regions where choice is limited. This result also holds when we account for residential sorting and focus on excess school segregation over and above the segregation that would occur if all pupils attended their assigned schools. The estimates suggest that the increase in school segregation 15 years after the voucher reform that can be attributed to choice is relatively small, and in an international comparison Sweden still ranks as a country with a low-to-medium segregated school system. Our findings are suggestive of the implications for student sorting in other settings where similar voucher schemes are introduced

Intergenerational Effects in Sweden : What Can We Learn from Adoption Data?

We explore the adoption data approach to estimating causal effects of parental education and income on the same outcomes of their children. Thanks to a data set drawn from Swedish population registers with detailed information on biological background and history of adoptees, we can test basic assumptions that the adoption strategy relies on. We find that the adoption method survives these tests surprisingly well. Our empirical results suggest that one more year of either mother?s or father?s education raises children?s education by about 0.1 year. Our estimated income elasticities are around 0.1