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This study examines the relationship between taxpayer balloting and school spending in New Jersey school districts over a ten-year period from 2003 to 2012. We use a unique dataset of defeated and approved school district budgets in New Jersey to gauge citizens’ ability to serve as a monitoring mechanism over public school spending. Fixed-effects panel analysis is used to examine how the results of the taxpayer ballots affected relative spending levels in school districts. We find a negative relation between the prior year’s balloting outcome and the current year’s relative costs, indicating that districts whose budget referenda were defeated the prior year tended to adjust spending downwards. In subsequent analysis, we examine the relation between changes in school district costs and sequential year-to-year voting outcomes. We find that both a defeated budget in the prior year followed by an approved budget and two consecutive defeated budgets were associated with lower spending, providing additional evidence of a “lagged effect” on spending from a defeated budget. Our results support the inference that taxpayer balloting can impose discipline on public spending by making public officials ultimately responsive to taxpayer preferences. Thus, taxpayer balloting appears to serve its intended purpose, despite its apparent unpopularity in some education circles.

Unlock the potential of public-private partnerships in education. This groundbreaking study offers fresh empirical evidence on the effectiveness and cost of various educational models in developing countries across Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Delve into rigorous case studies examining voucher programs and faith-based schools, uncovering key insights into school performance, targeting, and cost-effectiveness. Discover how these partnerships impact student achievement, literacy, and numeracy, and learn what factors drive success or failure. Emerging Evidence on Vouchers and Faith-Based Providers in Education is essential reading for policymakers, researchers, and practitioners seeking innovative solutions to improve educational outcomes and promote social mobility in developing nations. Explore the challenges and opportunities of these partnerships and gain a deeper understanding of how to create more effective and equitable education systems.

Public-private partnerships in education: an overview / Felipe Barrera-Osorio, Harry Anthony Patrinos, and Quentin Wodon -- The effectiveness of franchises and independent private schools in Chile's national voucher program / Gregory Elacqua, Dante Contreras, and Felipe Salazar -- Cognitive ability, heterogeneity, endogeneity and returns to schooling in Chile: outcomes of the 1981 capitation grant scheme / Harry Anthony Patrinos and Chris Sakellariou -- When schools are the ones that choose: the effect of screening in Chile / Dante Contreras, Sebastian Bustos, and Paulina Sepulveda -- How do vouchers work?: evidence from Colombia / Eric Bettinger, Michael Kremer, and Juan E. Saavedra -- The performance of decentralized school systems: evidence from Fe y Alegría in Venezuela / Hunt Allcott and Daniel E. Ortega -- Literacy and numeracy in faith-based and government schools in Sierra Leone / Quentin Wodon and Yvonne Ying -- Comparing faith-based and government schools in the Democratic Republic of Congo / Prospere Backiny-Yetna and Quentin Wodon -- Student achievement in religious and secular secondary schools in Bangladesh / Mohammad Niaz Asadullah, Nazmul Chaudhury and Amit Dar -- Does money matter?: the effect of private educational expenditures on academic performance / Changhui Kang -- Comparing the cost of public, religious, and private schooling in Cameroon / Prospere Backiny-Yetna and Quentin Wodon.

In this paper we investigate the demand for local public school expenditures in Sweden using survey data, a method previously never applied to Swedish data. We compare our results to those of earlier US studies, where the same method is used in a different institutional setup. Estimating a linear demand specification, we find that demand is inelastic with respect to income and taxprice, much in line with previous Swedish findings in a median voter framework. Estimation of a log-linear demand specification indicates that the elasticities of demand for schooling are higher in Sweden than in the US. Testing the hypothesis that municipal employees tend to have a higher demand for public spending than others, we conclude that income, as well as taxprice and grants, enters the demand function differently for the two groups of employees. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2001

The aim of this study is to examine whether the expansion of higher education across countries is associated with the growth of shadow education as a function of families’ efforts to ensure attainment of educational opportunities. To address this research objective, this study samples approximately 163,000 students, nested in 21 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, who took the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). This study employs multilevel logistic regression in order to investigate the research question. An analysis of whether the relationship between the expansion of higher education and the use of shadow education is substantial after controlling for national- and individual-level variables follows. The current study found a significant, positive relationship between the expansion of higher education and shadow education use in academic subjects for 21 countries in terms of the average growth rate of the population with higher education between 1955 and 2005 (AGR). The relationship was substantial even after controlling for national- and individual-level variables. This means that a student in a country with a high AGR was more likely to participate in shadow education than a student in a country with low AGR. When higher education was institutionalized in terms of AGR, shadow education use increased as a supplementary tool to achieve academic success in public education. This study also supports previous findings that a female student from a family with high socioeconomic status (SES) was more likely to participate in shadow education than a male student from a family with low SES. The findings show that while high-stakes testing did not have a substantial relationship with shadow education use in analyses with 21 and 20 countries, public education expenditure was negatively associated with shadow education use in the analysis with 20 countries. Further, the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and the relative income between high school and college graduates did not have significant relationships with shadow education use in the analyses with 21 and 20 countries, respectively. Public social expenditure was negatively associated with shadow education use for 20 countries. Therefore, the results of this study suggest that economic and social benefits are not likely to be determinants of shadow education, while the institutionalization of higher education in terms of AGR is related with shadow education use. In other words, the findings support the assertion that neo-institutionalism can explain the growth of shadow education use in parallel with the expansion of higher education across 21 OECD countries, although the functionalism, human capitalism, and competitive theory perspectives seemed to explain the relationship. This study contributes to the research literature by expanding the empirical understanding and body of evidence for the relationship between shadow education use and the expansion of higher education and the characteristics of shadow education. In the present era of mass shadow education, shadow education is rapidly becoming a salient focus of education policy around the globe. This research can help policymakers better prepare relevant policy measures for increasing shadow education use in order to supplement academic deficits, particularly for low-achieving students from families with low SES.

This paper examines the effects of total, mineral, natural gas, and oil rents on the public total, education, health, and infrastructure expenditures using the dynamic panel estimation methods and data for more than 100 countries for the 1980–2015 period. Our results indicate that total resource rents do not have a significant impact on the public total and infrastructure expenditures. However, they provide a robust evidence for the adverse effect of resource rents on the public education and health expenditures. Our results lend a substantial evidence for the conclusion that the notorious resource curse can be also explained by its adverse effect on the human capital accumulation. We then test whether the democracy level matters in investigating the effects of resource rents on the public expenditures. Interestingly, we find that total resource rents exert a negative impact on the education expenditures only in autocratic countries. These results clearly indicate that policy makers should take necessary steps to remove the adverse effects of resource rents on the public education and health expenditures to increase human capital formation.

Enhancing the role of private sector partners in education can lead to significant improvements in education service delivery. However, the realization of such benefits depends in great part on the design of the partnership between the public and private sectors, on the overall regulatory framework of the country, and on the governmental capacity to oversee and enforce its contracts with the private sector. Under the right terms, private sector participation in education can increase efficiency, choice, and access to education services, particularly for students who tend to fail in traditional education settings. Private-for-profit schools across the world are already serving a vast range of usersâ€\"from elite families to children in poor communities. Through balanced public-private partnerships (PPPs) in education, governments can leverage the specialized skills offered by private organizations as well as overcome operating restrictions such as salary scales and work rules that limit public sector responses. 'The Role and Impact of Public-Private Partnerships in Education' presents a conceptualization of the issues related to PPPs in education, a detailed review of rigorous evaluations, and guidleines on how to create successful PPPs. The book shows how this approach can facilitate service delivery, lead to additional financing, expand equitable access, and improve learning outcomes. The book also discusses the best way to set up these arrangements in practice. This information will be of particular interest to policymakers, teachers, researchers, and development practitioners.

Since the Coleman Report, many have questioned whether public school spending affects student outcomes. The school finance reforms that began in the early 1970s and accelerated in the 1980s caused dramatic changes to the structure of K–12 education spending in the United States. To study the effect of these school finance reform–induced changes in public school spending on long-run adult outcomes, we link school spending and school finance reform data to detailed, nationally representative data on children born between 1955 and 1985 and followed through 2011. We use the timing of the passage of court-mandated reforms and their associated type of funding formula change as exogenous shifters of school spending, and we compare the adult outcomes of cohorts that were differentially exposed to school finance reforms, depending on place and year of birth. Event study and instrumental variable models reveal that a 10% increase in per pupil spending each year for all 12 years of public school leads to 0.31 more completed years of education, about 7% higher wages, and a 3.2 percentage point reduction in the annual incidence of adult poverty; effects are much more pronounced for children from low-income families. Exogenous spending increases were associated with notable improvements in measured school inputs, including reductions in student-to-teacher ratios, increases in teacher salaries, and longer school years.

Estimates of health care costs associated with excess weight are needed to inform the development of cost-effective obesity prevention efforts. However, commonly used cost estimates are not sensitive to changes in weight across the entire body mass index (BMI) distribution as they are often based on discrete BMI categories. We estimated continuous BMI-related health care expenditures using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) 2011-2016 for 175,726 respondents. We adjusted BMI for self-report bias using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2011-2016, and controlled for potential confounding between BMI and medical expenditures using a two-part model. Costs are reported in $US 2019. We found a J-shaped curve of medical expenditures by BMI, with higher costs for females and the lowest expenditures occurring at a BMI of 20.5 for adult females and 23.5 for adult males. Over 30 units of BMI, each one-unit BMI increase was associated with an additional cost of $253 (95% CI $167-$347) per person. Among adults, obesity was associated with $1,861 (95% CI $1,656-$2,053) excess annual medical costs per person, accounting for $172.74 billion (95% CI $153.70-$190.61) of annual expenditures. Severe obesity was associated with excess costs of $3,097 (95% CI $2,777-$3,413) per adult. Among children, obesity was associated with $116 (95% CI $14-$201) excess costs per person and $1.32 billion (95% CI $0.16-$2.29) of medical spending, with severe obesity associated with $310 (95% CI $124-$474) excess costs per child. Higher health care costs are associated with excess body weight across a broad range of ages and BMI levels, and are especially high for people with severe obesity. These findings highlight the importance of promoting a healthy weight for the entire population while also targeting efforts to prevent extreme weight gain over the life course.