Does school ownership matter?an unbiased efficiency comparison for Spain regions

Resumen

PISA 2006 Report showed significant differences among Spanish students attending publicly financed schools. Publicly financed schools include entirely public schools and schools that are privately managed but publicly funded. Families with higher socio-economic status may self-select their children into government-dependent private schools, so a direct efficiency comparison between both school types could lead us to flawed conclusions because of the possible school selection bias. In this paper, we suggest using a quasi-experimental Propensity Score Matching approach in order to correctly analyze the impact of school ownership on students� achievements. After tackling the self-selection problem, we use a stochastic parametric distance functions framework to compare students� efficiency in both school types across ten Spanish regions using Programme for International Student Assessment 2006 data. Furthermore, we propose two original measures to analyze the impact of school ownership on academic performance across regions: the Average Treatment Effect on the Treated on the production frontier and the Average Treatment Effect on the Treated assuming school inefficiency. We find that, on average, government-dependent private schools are more efficient than public ones, although there are wide divergences on efficiency results by school type across regions.