بررسی تأثیر سرمایه روی پیشرفت تحصیلی

While a growing body of literature on education production looks at the impact school inputs have on academic achievement, virtually no research is examining the impact capital is having on academic achievement. In this study, we take an initial step towards that end. By using school districts' level of bond indebtedness as a proxy for capital, we find evidence that capital stock does affect academic achievement. In light of these findings along with the general lack of research on capital inputs, we conclude that capital expenditures should be given greater attention in future research.

Currently, there is a large and growing literature that examines the impact of school and family inputs on educational outcomes. This vast literature is exemplified in Hanushek's summary of over 377 estimates in 90 separate articles of the effect resources have on a range of different educational outcomes. These inputs include not only school-specific inputs (expenditures, teacher characteristics, etc.) and school organization inputs (class and school size, student-to-administration ratios, etc.), but also environmental characteristics (peer groups) and socioeconomic (family) characteristics. However, conspicuously absent from the literature is the effect of capital inputs, such as buildings and equipment, on educational outcomes.1 This gap in the literature exists despite the emphasis capital has received in school budgets. In 1999, over $20.5 billion was spent on school construction alone2 and a GAO report suggests that an additional $112 billion is needed to bring buildings to “good” condition (GAO, 1995). The allocation of resources of this magnitude represents a significant investment into an input whose value to the education process is unclear. This paper begins to fill the void in the literature by investigating capital's impact on student achievement. We define capital as the physical assets of a school, which include but are not limited to buildings, contents of buildings, parking lots, athletic facilities, and buses. Under current public accounting standards, direct measures of these assets do not exist. A reasonably imperfect surrogate measure for these assets is the level of school districts' bond indebtedness. Using bond indebtedness as a proxy for school capital in school districts in Michigan, we find evidence that variations across school districts' capital stock significantly affect academic achievement. These results have potentially weighty policy implications concerning the efficient allocation of resources for public education. Also, they illuminate the importance of a typically omitted variable in education production analysis. Compelling, yet far from conclusive, these results open the door for future research into the question “does capital matter in public education?” The remainder of this paper is divided into seven sections. In Section 2 we discuss the possible importance of capital in the production process, while Section 3 discusses the benefits and limitations of our proxy. In Section 4 we develop a model of education production with emphasis placed on measuring capital stock's impact on academic achievement and in Section 5 we provide an overview of the data. In Section 6 and Section 7 we display and discuss our results and conclusions.

In the economics of education literature, school inputs, particularly current operational expenditures, have received a great deal of attention, but capital inputs have been almost entirely neglected in the analysis of education production. In this research, we attempt to fill this void by examining the impact capital has on academic achievement. Capital, as we define it, represents the assets owned by schools that are used in the production of education. Because data on these assets do not exist, we use per-student bond indebtedness for each school district as a proxy for capital. Our results illustrate that at the margin, variations in capital stock are positively associated with variations in academic achievement, suggesting that capital is significant in the production of education. We argue that our results open the door for future research and that other interesting questions can be raised from our findings. For example, what specific elements of capital are driving our results? Do the results hold outside of Michigan? Is capital being used efficiently in public versus private schools? However, to pursue these research questions, more precise and detailed data are needed. In order to acquire better data, policies must be changed to require school districts to keep accurate accounting estimates of their physical assets.