Rational cuts? The local impact of closing undersized schools
利用意大利教育改革导致学校网络收缩的案例，研究发现关闭小学导致当地人口和收入显著下降，尤其影响远离经济中心和最近小学的偏远地区，表明学校“合理化”政策加剧了人口流失和区域不平等。
The availability of public education services can influence residential choices. Therefore, policies aimed at ‘rationalising’ service provision by reducing the number of undersized nodes in the public school network can lead to population decline, especially in spatially isolated areas lacking valid alternatives to the removed services. This paper examines the demographic and income effects of primary school closures by exploiting an Italian education reform that resulted in the contraction of the school network. We assess whether school closures impact households’ residential choices, over and above preexisting negative population trends that motivate school closures. Our findings indicate that municipalities affected by school closures experience significant reductions in population and income. The effect is primarily driven by peripheral municipalities located far away from economic centres and distant from the next available primary school. This evidence indicates that school ‘rationalisation policies’, by fostering depopulation of peripheral areas, have an influence on the spatial distribution of households and income, thus affecting territorial disparities.