Our paper focuses on the role that the gender composition of the leaders of American colleges and universities--trustees, presidents, and provosts--play in influencing the rate at which academic institutions diversify their faculty across gender lines. Our analyses make use of institutional level panel data that we have collected for a large…

Parents who volunteer, or who lobby for improvements in school quality, are generally seen as providing a school-wide public good. If so, straightforward public-good theory predicts that free-riding will reduce average involvement at larger schools. This study uses longitudinal data to follow families over time, as their children move from middle…

The size of schools and districts in which they are located has become a salient policy issue in recent years. While consolidation of school districts and expanding high school size were in vogue from the 1960s until recently, funding agencies are now sponsoring projects to reduce school size under the assumption that smaller schools will lead to…

With the financial support of several large foundations and the federal government, creating small schools has become a prominent high school reform strategy in many large American cities. While some research supports this strategy, little research assesses the relative costs of these smaller schools. We use data on over 200 New York City high…

The education cost literature includes econometric studies attempting to determine economies of scale, or estimate an optimal school or district size. Not only do their results differ, but the studies use dissimilar data, techniques, and models. To derive value from these studies requires that the estimates be made comparable. One method to do…

If economies of scale are important in secondary education, a greater degree of resource specialization and curriculum comprehensiveness should occur in larger secondary schools. Using New York State schools data, this study shows that scale economy sources are exhausted at relatively small enrollment levels, allowing only trivial gains in…

Empirical estimates of production frontiers and average production functions performed for selected public elementary school districts in California support the hypothesis of an optimal school size model. Some policy implications of the results are briefly analyzed. Appended are 16 references. (MLF)

Previous studies of the connection between school enrollment size and student achievement use cross-sectional econometric models and thus do not account for unobserved heterogeneity across schools. To address this concern, I utilize school-level panel data, and generate first-differences estimates of the effect of school size on achievement.…

This paper tests for the impact of school size, measured by number of pupils, on academic performance at age 16 controlling for exam scores 2 years earlier. Schools of more than at the most 600 pupils tend to achieve poorer public exam results in the long run and a higher proportion fail to gain any qualifications. School size affects attendance…

This paper studies teacher mobility using matched employee-employer panel data from Norwegian primary and lower secondary schools. The Norwegian institutional setup with completely centralized wage setting for teachers is ideal to analyze the effect of non-pecuniary job attributes on quit decisions. We find that teachers tend to leave schools with…

Using Canadian census data, finds that the size and direction of the impact of class size, school size, and teacher salaries vary across points in the conditional wage distribution. (Contains 25 references.) (PKP)

Determines optimal school size by exploring the cost-effectiveness of supplying study fields (services) in Belgian secondary schools. Using information on the fixed cost of supplying a study field (student density and transport cost), one may determine the optimal number of students in each study field. Actual size is far from optimal. (Contains…

A recent study found that local teacher salaries in North Carolina are related to cost-of-living measures. After accounting for education and experience characteristics, local teacher salaries are higher in districts having a greater proportion of secondary teachers, larger school sizes, and a greater demand for education. (Contains 20…

Investigates the performance of a regulated, equalized school system by analyzing the relationship between resource use and student achievement in 34 Norwegian high schools. Distinguishing between quantity and quality, uses data envelopment analysis to establish a reference frontier representing best practices and measure technical efficiencies.…

Explores whether state policies encouraging the consolidation of rural school districts to improve efficiency through economies of scale are substantiated in the research literature. Reviews three decades of research on education economies of scale involving cost and production-function studies. Finds little program-evaluation research on school…