Manipulable Variables of Policy Importance: The Case of Education

Within the past several years, there has emerged a growing body of empirical evidence that suggests greater market competition among schools has resulted in higher student academic achievement. Such a conclusion, however, may be viewed by some to be uncertain given the potential bias and inconsistency in the estimated coefficient on market competition that would result from a failure to recognize the endogeneity of market competition in the estimation of student achievement. This study corrects for the potential bias and inconsistency in the estimated coefficient on market competition by constructing a system of equations within which student achievement and market competition are explicitly endogenous.The results, first, suggest that researchers should indeed recognize the simultaneous relationship between student achievement and the degree of market competition in educational studies of student achievement and, second, confirm previous suggestions that policy-makers who seek to improve student academic achievement should construct policies that encourage market competition among schools.

Crime and community heterogeneity: race, ethnicity, and religion

Prior studies have explored the relationship between race and religion and their effect on various crimes. In the USA race is typically defined as the proportion of a community that is African-American or nonwhite. Likewise, religion is defined as the proportion of a community that adheres to any religious denomination. This study extends earlier work by employing Herfindahl indices as measures of community homogeneity with respect to race and ethnicity as well as religious denominations. It also measures religiosity based on four different denominational groups, rather than religiosity as an aggregate. Results indicate that as a community's degree of homogeneity increases, in terms of both race/ethnicity and religion, crime decreases; and that the effects of religion on crime may vary by denomination.

Teachers, race and student achievement revisited

Within the education literature, a controversy exists with respect to the issue of matching student and teacher race in an effort to improve student performance. Ehrenberg et al. (1995) finds very little support for this issue, while more recently Dee (2004) finds that there are significant educational gains when students are assigned to an own-race teacher. Dee's result is found after confirming that there was no association between assignment of an own-race teacher and student characteristics, i.e., sorting of students did not transpire. We extend Dee's work by including the effects of student innate ability and teacher gender on student achievement. Our findings indicate that once these two variables are taken into consideration, sorting of students does transpire, and matching students and teachers of similar race has no statistically significant affect on student achievement.

The role of politics and economics in the allocation of federal stimulus spending

This study identifies the political and economic variables that explain differences among US states in per capita funding resulting from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. We find a marginal statistically significant negative relationship between states that have been traditionally Democratic (Blue states) versus those that have traditionally been Republican (Red states). Additionally, we find a highly statistically significant negative relationship between states that were traditionally Republican but voted for President Obama in the 2008 election (Blue states) and traditionally Red states. Furthermore, our findings suggest that there is a statistically significant positive relationship between union representation for a state and per capita funding and between per capita electoral votes and per capita funding. With regard to economic variables, we find that a state's unemployment rate has a positive and statistically significant influence with regard to funding, but a state's poverty rate has no statistically significant impact on funding.

Teacher-associated expenditures and student achievement

Inconsistent evidence exists within the economics of education research literature with respect to the relationship between teacher salary and student performance. This paper shows that such inconsistency of results could be attributed to simultaneous equation bias and model misspecification. Using alternative model specifications, alternative implications are suggested. Where additional relevant variables such as a measure of cognitive skills and a measure of the degree of market competition are included and where the statistical model reflects relevant theoretical considerations, evidence of a positive and significant relationship between teacher-associated expenditures and student academic achievement does not exist.

Intra-school competition and student achievement

Within the economics of education literature, numerous studies have investigated the relationship between educational market competition and educational achievement. Educational market competition has been defined as either the availability of vouchers within a community or the number of schools or school districts within the relevant market structure. While these studies have shown that increases in inter-district competition result in increased student achievement, no studies, to our knowledge, have yet investigated the effect of intra-school competition on student achievement. Within this study, a measure of intra-school competition is developed and the findings indicate that increased intra-school competition leads to increased student achievement.

An investigation of the effect of class size on student academic achievement

Despite the existence of a considerable and current educational literature concerned with the effect of class size on student achievement, the results of attempts to empirically identify the relationship between the variables class size and student achievement are mixed at best. These attempts have typically been hindered, however, by the existence, at least, of one of four factors: (1) the use of a student/teacher ratio as the measure of class size resulting in measurement error; (2) the estimation of a mis-specified model resulting from the failure to control for family effects (i.e., student innate ability); (3) the general failure to take into account the endogeneity of class size with respect to student achievement; and (4) the employment of an incorrect functional form when specifying the relationship between class size and student achievement. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of class size on student achievement, unhindered by the existence of the four factors typically associated with prior attempts. The results of this reinvestigation suggest that the relationship between class size and student achievement is not only non-linear, but non-monotonic.Class size, student achievement, optimality, competition,