Immigration, Public Education Spending, and Private Schooling

Abstract

This article examines the impact of immigration on private school enrollment through the mechanism of public education spending. It finds that the immigrant share of population raises private school enrollment across countries by leading to a decrease in the share of public education spending. The decrease is driven by responses to immigrants from culturally similar and developed countries. This suggests that the role of public schools in promoting social cohesion among diverse populations is weighted against other concerns in education funding decisions in places with immigrant populations. The endogeneity of immigrant share is accounted for by using an instrument constructed from gravity model estimates.

Immigration and Political Instability

“…The instrumental variable approach we used to deal with the endogeneity of immigrant share follows Mavisakalyan () and relies on estimating a variant of a gravity model where bilateral immigrant shares are regressed on a set of characteristics of countries . These include the difference in income per capita between the two countries, the log of distance, the log of partner country population, the log of product of the surface areas of the two countries , and dummy variables for common language and common land border.…”

“…Following previous studies having taken the same approach to instrumentation (e.g. Felbermayr, Hiller, and Sala, ; Mavisakalyan, ), we ignore this potential dependency in computing our covariance matrices, and instead try not to put much emphasis on their precise size.…”

Factors Influencing the State-Level Settlement Pattern of the Undocumented Immigrant Population in the United States

“…For example, Mavisakalyan (2011) examined the issue of undocumented immigration and its implications for public education spending and private schooling. In particular, Mavisakalyan (2011, p. 397) investigated the effect on private school enrollment through the mechanism of public education outlays, finding that a growing immigrant share of the population raises enrollment in private schools, confirming similar conclusions by Betts and Fairlie (2003).…”

Immigration, Occupational Choice and Public Employment

“…7 Speciale (2012) shows that, while the immigrant cieties) and public good provision. They find a negative effect of the immigration on specific public goods like education as a share of total public spending (Mavisakalyan, 2011) or on specific public spending in per capita terms (Razin et al, 2002;Speciale, 2012). Some other studies mitigate these findings.…”

“…On the other hand, immigrants benefit from public transfers and have a demand for public services provided by civil servants. 4 Despite finding that immigration reduces the share of government spending on public education (using 2000 data for 80 countries), Mavisakalyan (2011) does not exclude that immigration may induce a higher total demand for public services, like education, health and "other publicly provided goods, such as infrastructure or public housing". 5 Moreover, many countries created specific public entities (and related jobs)…”