The State, Socialisation, and Private Schooling: When Will Governments Support Alternative Producers?
构建了一个理论模型，解释政府为何通常直接提供学校教育，并预测在何种条件下，私立学校、特许学校、教育券和奖学金等替代方案更可能获得政府支持。
Understanding the institutional features that can improve learning outcomes and reduce inequality is a top priority for international and development organisations around the world. Economists appear to have a good case for support to non-governmental alternatives as suppliers of schooling. However, unlike other policy domains, freer international trade or privatisation, economists have been remarkably unsuccessful in promoting the adoption of this idea. We develop a general positive model of why governments typically produce schooling which introduces the key notion of the lack of verifiability of socialisation and instruction of beliefs, which makes third party contracting for socialisation problematic. We use the model to explain variations around the world in levels of private schooling. We also predict the circumstances in which efforts to promote the different alternatives to government production - like charter, voucher, and scholarship - are likely to be successful.