Measuring school demand in the presence of spatial dependence. A conditional approach

Improving educational quality is an important public policy goal. However, success requires identifying factors associated with student achievement. At the core of these proposals is the principle that increased public school quality can make school system more efficient, resulting in correspondingly stronger performance by students. Nevertheless, public educational system is not devoid of competition which arises, among other factors, through the management efficiency and the geographical location of schools. Moreover, households in Spain appear to choose one school through location. In this environment, the objective of this paper is to analyze whether geographical space has an impact on the relationship between the level of technical quality of public schools (measured by the efficiency score) and the school demand index. To do this, an empirical application is performed on a sample of 1,695 public schools in the region of Catalonia (Spain). The effects of spatial autocorrelation on the estimation of the parameters and how these problems are addressed through spatial econometrics models are shown. The results confirm the space plays a moderating effect on the relationship between efficiency and school demand. Nonetheless, such impact only occurs in urban municipalities.