Choice, Competition, and Pupil Achievement
研究英国小学中，学校选择范围和学生成绩的关系，以及学校间竞争对成绩的影响。使用工具变量法发现竞争带来的成绩提升有限，仅在自主权较大的学校中才存在正向因果效应。
Choice and competition in education have recently found growing support from both policy-makers and academics. Yet evidence on the actual benefits of market-orientated reforms is at best mixed. Moreover, although the economic rationale for choice and competition is clear, in existing work there is rarely an attempt to distinguish between the two concepts. In this paper, we study whether pupils in Primary schools in England with a wider range of school choices achieve better academic outcomes than those whose choice is more limited; and whether Primary schools facing more competition perform better than those in a more monopolistic situation. In simple least squares regression models we find little evidence of a link between choice and achievement, but uncover a small positive association between competition and school performance. Yet this could be related to endogenous school location or pupil sorting. In fact, an instrumental variable strategy based on discontinuities generated by admissions district boundaries suggests that the performance gains from greater school competition are limited. Only when we restrict our attention to Voluntary Aided schools, which have more freedom in managing their governance and admission practices, do we find some evidence of a positive causal link between competition and pupil achievement.