A Neighborly Welcome?: Charter School Entrance and Public School Competition on the Capital Margin

Abstract

In 1999, the Utah State Legislature allowed charter schools to enter and be administered under the broad oversight of school districts. The structure of the Utah Charter School provides a natural experiment to study a unique way that traditional public schools compete against new charter schools. Using data from the 1992-2012 waves of the Common Core of Data, we estimated fixed effect models to measure the increase in capital expenditures by traditional public schools when faced with competition by new charter schools. We find that total capital outlay and spending on improving existing structures increases with charter competition, but new construction and instructional spending does not increase at a statistically significant level. We also conduct a placebo experiment that strengthens our empirical findings.