An International Comparison of the Effect of Private Education Spending on Student Academic Performance:Evidence from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), 2006

This paper undertakes an international study on impacts of private education spending on student academic performance, using the OECD's PISA 2006 data. To circumvent endogeneity of the education spending, it relies on a propensity-score matching method. The empirical results suggest that the effect of private education spending remains only modest for all the countries examined in the PISA 2006 data. A 10 percent increase in spending leads to no more than a 0.6 percent average improvement in test scores.