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Nationwide school choice and fixed per-student governmental funding provide incentives for Dutch schools to perform well. Roughly one third of Dutch pre-university schools are of catholic denomination. Acknowledging this widely available outside option to public and other schools, this paper considers the effect of catholic competition on non-catholic school performance in pre-university education. Employing data from central exit exams, a positive link between competition intensity and academic achievement is found. In addition to raising achievement, higher levels of competition are not associated with a deterioration of grading standards. Finally, (inverse) quantile regression estimates show no evidence of schools at the bottom of the achievement distribution being hurt by competition.

A simple model of decentralised graduation standards is presented. It is shown that a school whose students are disadvantaged on the labour market applies less demanding standards because such students have less incentives to graduate. The model's predictions are tested using Dutch school-level data. Since students in the Netherlands have to participate both in a central and in a school specific examination, we can identify the grading policy of individual schools. We find that schools which harbour greater shares of disadvantaged students tend to set lower standards. This effect is largest in the branch of secondary schooling preparing for university.

Diese Arbeit untersucht theoretisch und empirisch, wie Institutionen in Medien- und Bildungsmärkten Verhaltensanreize für Wirtschaftssubjekte gestalten, und wie sich diese Anreize auf politische Entscheidungen auswirken. Es wird gezeigt, dass an niederländischen Schulen ein hoher Anteil von Schülern aus sozial benachteiligten Schichten mit niedrigeren Notenstandards einhergeht und dass Schulwettbewerb auf lokalen Bildungsmärkten positive Effekte auf die schulischen Leistungen zeitigt. Die Analyse von Medienmärkten liefert zunächst mit Hilfe von Daten zur räumlichen Verbreitung US-amerikanischer Fernsehsender Belege dafür, dass Politiker Anreizen unterliegen, öffentliche Gelder vermehrt an informierte Wähler zu vergeben. Danach wird dargelegt, dass auf ähnliche Weise in Norwegen einem steigenden Zeitungsleseranteil in der Wählerschaft ein Effizienz steigernder Effekt auf die kommunale Mittelverwendung innewohnt und damit zu bürgernäheren politischen Prozessen führt. ; At the core of this book are theoretical and empirical analyses of how local policies are shaped by the incentives that various institutions in education and media markets create for economic agents. Evidence is provided that Dutch schools harboring large shares of disadvantaged students apply lower grading standards and that there is a positive link between intensity of competition among schools in local education markets and academic achievement. When it comes to media markets, data on the location of television stations in the United States is employed in showing that there are incentives for politicians to gear public spending towards informed voters. In a similar vein, increasing levels of newspaper readership are shown to exhibit an efficiency enhancing effect on Norwegian local governments and thus elicit better politics.

At the core of this book are theoretical and empirical analyses of how local policies are shaped by the incentives that various institutions in education and media markets create for economic agents. Evidence is provided that Dutch schools harboring large shares of disadvantaged students apply lower grading standards and that there is a positive link between intensity of competition among schools in local education markets and academic achievement. When it comes to media markets, data on the location of television stations in the United States is employed in showing that there are incentives for politicians to gear public spending towards informed voters. In a similar vein, increasing levels of newspaper readership are shown to exhibit an efficiency enhancing effect on Norwegian local governments and thus elicit better politics ...

Nationwide school choice and fixed per-student governmental funding provide incentives for Dutch schools to perform well. Roughly one third of Dutch pre-university schools are of catholic denomination. Acknowledging this widely available outside option to public and other schools, this paper considers the effect of catholic competition on non-catholic school performance in pre-university education. Employing data from central exit exams, a positive link between competition intensity and academic achievement is found. In addition to raising achievement, higher levels of competition are not associated with a deterioration of grading standards. Finally, (inverse) quantile regression estimates show no evidence of schools at the bottom of the achievement distribution being hurt by competition.

Politicians seeking reelection need voters to know what they have done for them. Thus, incentives may arise to spend more money where media coverage is higher.We present a simple model to explain the allocation of public spending across jurisdictions contingent on media activity. A politician seeking to maximize the probability of reelection will shift more money to jurisdictions where an extra dollar raises more votes because a larger share of the electorate is informed about his policy. The main prediction of the model is that media activity is higher in the core areas of media markets. This implies higher spending levels there and lower spending levels in remote jurisdictions. Empirical support for this prediction is found using United States data on county-level federal grant allocation, Designated Market Areas and the location of licensed television stations. ; peerReviewed

Politicians seeking reelection need voters to know what they have done for them. Thus, incentives may arise to spend more money where media coverage is higher. We present a simple model to explain the allocation of public spending across jurisdictions contingent on media activity. An incumbent seeking to maximize the probability of reelection will shift more money to jurisdictions where an extra dollar gains more votes because a larger share of the electorate is informed about his policy. This prediction is tested using US data on county-level public spending, Designated Market Areas (DMAs) and location of licensed television stations. Instrumenting for the possible endogeneity of media activity to public spending, 2SLS results confirm a positive effect of media coverage on county-level public spending. Spatial regression rules out the possibility of confounding media effects with spatial autocorrelation.