Incentives and the Supply of Effective Charter Schools

Abstract

Charter school funding is typically set by formulas that provide the same amount for students regardless of advantage or need. I present evidence that this policy skews the distribution of students served by charters toward low-cost populations by influencing where charter schools open and whether they survive. To do this, I develop and estimate an equilibrium model of charter school supply and competition to evaluate the effects of funding policies that aim to correct these incentives. The results indicate that a cost-adjusted funding formula would increase the share of disadvantaged students in charter schools with little reduction in aggregate effectiveness. (JEL H75, I21, I22, I28)

Measuring Substitution Patterns in Differentiated-Products Industries

“…A growing number of papers using our instruments confirm these results. The Differentiation IVs introduced in this paper have now been used to obtain precise estimates of substitution patterns in a variety of applied contexts, ranging from demand for cars (Miravete, Moral, andCoşar, Grieco, andTintelnot 2018), scanner data (Miller and Weinberg (2017), Sullivan (2020), Dube, Hortacsu, and Joo (2020)), and school choice (Singleton 2019). See also Conlon and Gortmaker (2019) for additional Monte-Carlo simulation results.…”

The Fiscal Externalities of Charter Schools: Evidence from North Carolina

“…See Epple, Romano, and Zimmer (2016) for a recent review of the literature. Recent work (Singleton 2019) also examines the equity implications of how charter schools respond to funding. 2.…”

Experimentally Validating Welfare Evaluation of School Vouchers: Part I

“…Such responses to a universal voucher at scale are likely to include adjustments to tuition, school quality, peer composition, program participation, and entry/exit. Several papers focused on diverse settings have examined these and other dimensions of school competition (e.g Bau 2017;Andrabi et al 2017b;Singleton 2017;Sánchez 2018;…”