On the political economy of educational vouchers

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Epple, Dennis; Romano, Richard
• 署名单位: Carnegie Mellon University; National Bureau of Economic Research; State University System of Florida; University of Florida
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2014.07.012
• 发表日期: 2014
• 页码: 62-73
• 关键词: vouchers; Education political economy; voting

摘要

Two significant challenges hamper the analyses of the collective choice of educational vouchers. One is the multidimensional choice set arising from the interdependence of the voucher, public education spending, and taxation. Second, even absent a voucher, preferences over public spending are not single-peaked; a middling level of public school spending may be less attractive to a household than either high public school spending or private education coupled with low public spending. We show that Besley and Coate's (1997) representative democracy model provides a viable approach to overcome these hurdles. We provide a complete characterization of equilibria with an endogenous voucher. A voucher is adopted in political equilibrium provided the coefficient of variation of income is sufficiently small. We undertake a parallel quantitative analysis and we find that no voucher arises in equilibrium for the U.S. income distribution, which exhibits too much heterogeneity. For a tighter income distribution, including those in Douglas County, Colorado where a voucher was recently adopted, our model predicts a positive voucher. Public support for a not-too-large voucher arises because the cross subsidy to public school expenditure from those switching to private schools outweighs the subsidy to those who attend private school in the absence of a voucher. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.