Kaire Põder

Efficiency and Equity within European Education Systems and School Choice Policy: Bridging Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches.

We seek out the good institutional features of the European choice policies that can enhance both equity and efficiency at the system level. For causality analysis we construct the typology of 28 European educational systems by using fuzzy-set analysis. We combine five independent variables to indicate institutional features of school choice policy: availability of choice, tracking, school variability, empowerment of parents, and financial incentive schemes supporting choice policy. Findings show that the most important complements producing efficiency are “no-choice” with “no-tracking” and “choice” together with “tracking” and “school variability.” “No-choice” with “no-tracking” can also lead to more equity.

Will Choice Hurt? Compared to What? A School Choice Experiment in Estonia

This article presents the empirical analysis of the effects of a school choice policy in Estonia. The article shows that relying on markets and giving autonomy to the schools over student selection will produce admission tests, even at the elementary school level. This article’s contribution is to show that a school choice policy experiment with schools free to select students will produce between-school segregation effects based on residential and background characteristics. However, the interpretation of these effects is complex because, when compared with the premarket, residential choice model, it diminishes segregation based on income and family socioeconomic status.

School Choice Policy: Seeking to Balance Educational Efficiency and Equity. A Comparative Analysis of 20 European Countries

In recent years, the degree of choice in education systems has increased in most countries. Still, the variation of choice policies across countries is substantial. The authors ask under what combinations of conditions (i.e. institutional features of education systems) choice policy succeeds in balancing educational efficiency and equity. Using the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, they investigate the impact of seven institutional conditions in 20 European countries. Those seven conditions are identified in school choice literature as relevant in explaining variations in educational efficiency and equity. The analysis shows that there are multiple causal paths to good policy outcome. The main contribution of this article is to show that ‘choice’ is an INUS condition (i.e. an insufficient but necessary part of an unnecessary but sufficient combination of conditions) and that ‘no tracking’ is a necessary condition for educational efficiency and equity. In addition, the authors show that ‘good management’ and ‘competition’ of schools contribute to good educational outcomes only in choice-tolerant countries.

Does School Admission by Zoning Affect Educational Inequality? A Study of Family Background Effect in Estonia, Finland, and Sweden

ABSTRACT We indicate the size of family background effects in Sweden, Finland, and Estonia – countries that differ in both the rhetoric and extensiveness of the system-level school choice policies. Family background effect is defined as the dependence of student achievement on family background characteristics, such as parental education, income, and social status. The number of books at home is used as a proxy when operationalising family background, and its effect is measured as a percentage of individual-level PISA scores. Fixed-effect regression results reveal that family background remains a powerful determinant in the educational results of 15-year-old students in all three cases, being largest in Sweden. Furthermore, we show how the family background effect is moderated by school-level choice policy, that is, how students and schools are matched. The analysis reveals that zoning policies have statistically significant negative effects on the impact of the family background effect, independent of country-level policies.

Credible commitment and cartel: the case of the Hansa merchant in the guild of late medieval Tallinn

Abstract This paper contributes to the ongoing debate of institutional research in economics and the methodological debate over the plausibility of using analytic narratives, in social sciences in particular. Using a single historical case we argue that in Tallinn by and large the merchant guild solved a commitment problem in the Hanseatic League and the organisation-institution of the guild was meant for efficient enforcement of inter-city trade. We show that this argument holds in the late medieval period by using an extensive form of punishment and sanctions game. We also argue that after the breakup of the Hanseatic League, guilds turned into protectionist and rent-seeking cartels.