Size and School District Consolidation: Do Opposites Attract?

Abstract

Municipalities sometimes retain separate police departments and park services while cooperating in public schooling services with neighboring municipalities. The theoretical model of Ellingsen (Journal of Public Economics, 68, 251–68, 1998) predicts that: (1) under Tiebout sorting, larger size differences make big municipalities more likely to consolidate with small ones, but small municipalities less likely to consolidate with big ones; (2) municipalities never excessively consolidate. The current study examines 298 pairs of municipalities that could consolidate schooling. The decision‐making process of the larger and smaller member of each pair is examined separately. The Poirier bivariate probit results are consistent with Ellingsen's predictions but contradict previous empirical findings.

Municipal consolidation and local government behavior: evidence from Japanese voting data on merger referenda

“…The literature finds evidence for trade-off between scale economy and heterogeneity of preference, particularly with respect to income and race (e.g., Alesina, Baqir, and Hoxby, 2004;Alesina and Spolaore, 2003;Austin, 1999;Brasington, 1999Brasington, , 2003aBrasington, , 2003bGordon and Knight, 2009;Nelson, 1990;Sorensen, 2006). 4 These empirical studies employed a discrete choice model to investigate the role of economics of scale, heterogeneous preference, and tax base gains in merger decisions.…”

The Effect of School Consolidation on Student Achievement

“…GPA and exam results prior to closure are explored in Table 8 in the appendix. Neither 9 In the regressions, school size occurs as the no. of graduates from a school in a given year, i.e., its cohort size.…”

“…While Angrist and Levy exploited class size rules in Israel, Krueger (1999) conducted a field experiment where students were randomly assigned to classes of different sizes. Despite the different approaches, both Angrist and Lavy (1999) and Krueger (1999) Brasington (1997Brasington ( , 1999Brasington ( , 2003) is also concerned with the trade-off between school size and competition. In Brasington (1997), numerous covariates are utilized to explore how school size and district size affect graduation rates.…”

“…In Brasington (1997), numerous covariates are utilized to explore how school size and district size affect graduation rates. Brasington (1999) explores area characteristics that are associated with school mergers, while Brasington (2003) assesses how city size influences the decision to consolidate schools.…”

“…9 The main insight from Table 6 is the lack of significance for the effect of consolidation on the grade point average. Coefficients from the GPA regression have a similar magnitude as corresponding estimates from alternative outcomes.…”