published as 'Educational standards in private and public schools' in: The Economic Journal, 2008, 118 (533), 1866-1887
Motivated by anecdotal as well as econometric evidence from Italy, we ask whether private
schools can provide lower quality than public schools. Using a stylized model of the
education market with sequential entry of a public and a private school, we show that,
depending on the underlying parameters of the model, a market structure with the private
school offering at a positive price lower quality than the public school can be an equilibrium.
The calibrated parameters for Italy suggest the existence of such an equilibrium in the Italian
market for education.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.