We study the effects of giving poor females the right to vote in local elections on education spending and teacher-student ratios. To estimate causal effects, we exploit a national voting reform in Norwegian local elections that removed socioeconomic restrictions on female voting rights. The identification strategy exploits heterogeneous changes…

To create their rankings, university-ranking agencies usually combine multiple performance measures into a composite index. However, both rankings and index scores are sensitive to the weights assigned to performance measures. This paper uses a stochastic dominance efficiency methodology to obtain two extreme, case-weighting vectors using the…

In many transition countries, including Ukraine, decreases in population and fertility have led to substantial falls in the number of school-aged children. As a consequence, these countries now have school networks that consist of many small schools, leading many countries to consider reorganizing their networks by closing smaller schools and…

This paper examines whether the rapid growth in the number of students in British universities in recent years has led to congestion, in the sense that certain universities' output could have been higher if this expansion had been less rapid. The focus of the paper is on 45 older universities that were in existence prior to 1992. The analysis…

Over the last 30 years there has been a massive expansion of the British higher education system. The removal of supply constraints on the provision of higher education, accompanied by a broadening of the constituency of higher education has allowed a larger pool of ability to benefit from schooling at tertiary level. (Author)

Notes increased local government autonomy can cause broader inequalities in educational supply. Analyzes Norwegian municipalities' priorities concerning basic education, focusing on teaching input, class size, and administrative outlays for 1980-92. Findings show resource input has increased, teacher-student ratio is insensitive to local revenue…

Using the production-function approach and data from Baltimore (Maryland) public elementary schools, a study shows that school size minimally affects student performance on standardized achievement tests. Regression analysis shows the importance of students' socioeconomic status and negative effects of school input measures such as teacher/pupil…