Seminar by Olmo Silva: EVENTO CANCELLATO

SALA SEMINARI – 1° PIANO, PALAZZO LEVI CASES, VIA DEL SANTO 33 - ORE 12.30

02.04.2019

Seminar by Olmo Silva, LSE

Title: "The organisational economics of school trusts" - with Lorenzo Neri and Elisabetta Pasini

Abstract: We investigate the internal structures of English multi-academy trusts (MATs) using the lenses of the organizational economics of the firm. We borrow the following key insights. The choice of the ‘board’ – i.e., the entity responsible for the performance of the network – to delegate key decisions to school head-teachers – i.e., the practitioners delivering teaching alongside their staff – is characterised by the same trade-offs identified by the literature that uses incomplete contracts to study the organization of firms. Specifically, when the principal has limited information and decides to delegate decision-making there can be benefits: decentralising incentivises the agent to acquire more information about the best course of action (an ‘initiative effect’). However, there can be costs – mainly in the form of a ‘loss of control’– because the agent might choose to use any information advantage to choose actions/projects that do not line up with the strategies preferred by the principal. Our contribution is to make use of the tools developed in this literature to study the internal organization of schools trusts. Our evidence confirms most of the predictions put forward by this literature. Future work will investigate the link between the structures of school networks and their students’ performance, and provide a consolidated framework to think about the trade-offs faced by trusts when delegating decision-making and choosing their optimal internal structure.