Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/35011 
Year of Publication: 
2008
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 3691
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
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.
Subjects: 
Private schooling
choice
competition
educational achievement
JEL: 
I22
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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