Competition and Resource Effectiveness in Education

This paper examines the impact of competition in the markets for teachers and for housing on the long-standing issue of the influence of school resourcing on educational attainment. The existence of such competition is found to imply not only downward bias in many earlier empirical estimates of the role of resources in the educational production function, but also powerful general equilibrium effects, especially for the impact of relative levels of school resources on the distribution of relative levels of educational attainment across individual schools, that highlight the importance of how resources are distributed across individual schools.