Does School Privatization Improve Educational Achievement?
Does School Privatization Improve Educational Achievement?
Evidence from Sweden’s Voucher Reform
This paper evaluates general achievement effects of choice and competition between private
and public schools at the nine-year school level by assessing a radical voucher reform that
was implemented in Sweden in 1992. Starting from a situation where the public schools
essentially were monopolists on all local school markets, the degree of privatization has
developed very differently across municipalities over time as a result of this reform. We
estimate the impact of an increase in private enrolment on short, medium and long-term
educational outcomes of all pupils using within-municipality variation over time, and control
for differential pre-reform and concurrent municipality trends. We find that an increase in the
private school share moderately improves short-term educational outcomes such as 9thgrade
GPA and the fraction of students who choose an academic high school track.
However, we do not find any impact on medium or long-term educational outcomes such as
high school GPA, university attainment or years of schooling. We conclude that the first-order
short-term effect is too small to yield lasting positive effects.
Anders Böhlmark, SOFI, Stockholm University
Mikael Lindahl ,Uppsala University, IFAU and IZA
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