Does Greater School Autonomy Benefit Academic Performance?

Dr. Chiara Amini and Dr. Eugene Nivorozhkin (SSEES, UCL) will investigate the relationship between school autonomy and students’ academic performance in 31 Russian regions at this lunchtime seminar organised by the UCL SSEES Economics and Business Seminar Series. The empirical methodology addresses the effects of regional unobserved factors and selection bias and allows us to credibly identify the impact of school autonomy. The results indicate a more upbeat picture concerning the effect of a greater budget autonomy relative to a greater academic-content autonomy, which tends to be mostly negative. We also explore the impact of two mediating factors, namely the level of regional economic development and the extent of schools’ accountability. We find that higher economic development of regions tends to be associated with a lower impact of autonomy on educational performance and argue that this is likely to reflect specific features of countries where higher economic development may not necessarily be synonymous of greater institutional capability.