John Singleton - Practice JMT
"Incentives and the Supply of Effective Charter Schools"
Date: 10/03/2016 (Mon)
Time: 11:45am- 1:00pm
Location: Seminar will be held on-site: Social Sciences 113
Organizer: John Singleton
Meeting Schedule: (Not currently open for scheduling. Please contact the seminar organizer listed above.)
All meetings will be held in the same location as the seminar unless otherwise noted.
11:45am - Seminar Presentation (11:45am to 1:00pm)
Additional Comments: Abstract: Charter school funding is typically set by formulas that provide the same amount for all students. In this paper, I present evidence that this policy skews the distribution of students served by charters towards low-cost populations. I develop and estimate an empirical model of charter school supply and competition to evaluate the effects of funding policies that aim to correct these incentives. To do this, I recover estimates of ``costliness to educate'' across student populations by linking estimates of charter school effectiveness at raising student achievement with unique records of charter school expenditures gathered from Florida. I then leverage revealed preference with entering charter schools' location choices in an entry game to uncover how charter schools respond to competitive and financial incentives. The results indicate that a cost-adjusted funding formula would significantly increase the share of charter schools serving underserved populations with little reduction in aggregate effectiveness.