Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Is the distribution in geographic of the population associated with the quality of the delivery of government services? In this paper, I explore the hypothesis that the density of the population in the geographic space has an effect on the performance of the public education in the United States.

Using variation in density across school districts in the United States, I firstly find a robust positive relation between district density and student performance in standardized exams. To tackle the likely endogeneity of density to previous student outcomes I analyze the relation at different jurisdictional levels. I also use a instrumental variable approach, using a series of variables that relate to density but are otherwise plausibly uncorrelated with student outcomes, such as geographic characteristics, historic density and a measure of predicted density at a given time on the basis of the natural evolution of age cohorts at earlier times. The magnitude of the relation is about a third of that of other school level interventions, such as substituting average teachers by high performing ones.

This constitutes the first evidence (to my knowledge) of a relation between the spatial configuration of the population and the quality of K-12 education, delivered as a local public service. It builds on the known findings of the agglomeration economics literature of a relation between population density and economic outcomes (see, Glaeser, 2010 for an overview). It also shows that geographical distribution still matters for the delivery of public services and in particular in education, which is consistent with some of the findings of historical effectiveness of political systems (Stasavage 2010) and the relation between population distribution and corruption levels in US states (Campante and Do, 2014).

Secondly, I explore the consequences of population agglomeration for the distribution of educational outcomes across different groups and reach the conclusion that while density may be associated with higher student performance, it is also associated with greater inequality in performance within geographical areas (commuter zones). This finding echoes and provides an explanation in a different political context for the association between wealth, average student outcomes and inequality in student outcomes that Gingrich and Ansell (2014) find in the United Kingdom. Following these findings, I hypothesize and find support for two different mechanisms that contribute to this relation: a more efficient use of educational resources and better information and increased accountability from citizens about each district’s schools. I am able to exploit detailed data on spending in school districts throughout the United States as well as a multi-year representative survey on engagement, attitudes and political participation in education in the United States.