‘Every Catholic Child in a Catholic School’: Historical Resistance to State Schooling, Contemporary Private Competition and Student Achievement across Countries
研究发现，1900年天主教人口比例高的国家，如今私立学校占比也更高，且这种竞争提升了数学、科学和阅读成绩，同时降低了教育总支出。
Nineteenth-century Catholic doctrine strongly opposed state schooling. We show that countries with larger shares of Catholics in 1900 (but without a Catholic state religion) tend to have larger shares of privately operated schools even today. We use this historical pattern as a natural experiment to estimate the causal effect of contemporary private competition on student achievement in cross-country student-level analyses. Our results show that larger shares of privately operated schools lead to better student achievement in mathematics, science and reading, and to lower total education spending, even after controlling for current Catholic shares. Copyright © The Author(s). Journal compilation © Royal Economic Society 2010.