The organizational economics of school chains

We use the insights of firms' organizational economics to study school chains' organization. We match information on decentralization of activities for approximately 400 chains and 2,000 schools in England to student and school administrative records. Chains with a larger share of schools whose leadership background is aligned with the chain's expertise, younger chains, and chains close to the productivity frontier decentralize more. We investigate the link between decentralization and school performance - and find no association. This is consistent with the intuition that chains choose structures that maximize students' learning, so the equilibrium relationship between performance and organizational set-up is flat.