Horizontal Differentiation and the Policy Effect of Charter Schools
研究特许学校扩张对教育质量的总体影响，发现公立学校在面临非横向差异化的特许学校竞争时，会提前提升学生成绩。
While school choice may enhance competition, incentives for public schools to raise productivity may be muted if public education is imperfectly substitutable with alternatives. This paper estimates the aggregate effect of charter school expansion on education quality while accounting for the horizontal differentiation of charter programs. Our research design leverages variation following the removal of North Carolina’s statewide cap to compare test score changes for students who lived near entering charters to those farther away. We find learning gains that are driven by public schools responding to increased competition from non-horizontally differentiated charter schools, even before those charters actually open.