School accountability and student achievement: neighbouring schools matter
利用日本47个县中仅一个县意外公开学校层面全国统考成绩的自然实验，研究发现信息公开能提升学生成绩，尤其当学校附近有其他学校时效果更显著。
Abstract Previous research has shown that a public disclosure of school-level results of a national standardized student achievement test has potential to improve student achievement by holding a school accountable for its own results that are comparable to other schools. This article, highlighting a national assessment, a type of standardized test that gives schools diagnostic feedback without having high stakes for students, explores heterogeneous effects of the information disclosure. Utilizing a natural experiment where school-level results of Japan’s national assessment were unexpectedly disclosed only for one of the forty-seven prefectures in 2013, we show that the disclosure improves student achievement particularly when a school has other schools in close proximity, namely neighbouring schools. Our results suggest that informing parents about school performance is especially useful for improving school effectiveness when they can compare results with nearby, familiar schools rather than distant, unfamiliar ones.