Flores-Lagunes article on open enrollment choice published in RSUE

Oct 29, 2015

A spatial model of school district open enrollment choice

David Brasington, Alfonso Flores-Lagunes & Ledia Guci

Regional Science and Urban Economics, October 2015

Alfonso Flores-Lagunes

Economics Department

Aging Studies Institute

Center for Policy Research

Education

Regional Science and Urban Economics

Alfonso Flores-Lagunes

The authors provide an analysis of the determinants of adoption of inter-district open enrollment policies by school districts in Ohio. Legislation passed in 1997 allows Ohio's school districts to adopt one of the following open enrollment options: 1) prohibit enrollment of students from any other school district in the state (no open enrollment), 2) permit enrollment of students from adjacent school districts, or 3) permit enrollment of students from any school district in the state.

The authors employ a recently developed spatial autoregressive lag multinomial logit model to examine the determinants of adoption of each open enrollment alternative. Among the most influential factors are school districts' demographic characteristics, financial factors, and competitive environment. More importantly, the results show evidence of strategic interaction, with a positive correlation in policy choice between neighboring school districts of about 0.4.