Evidence that local tax and expenditure limits (TELs) for public K-12 schools lower student achievement is widely attributed to the effects of reduced funding, but our results cast doubt on reduced funding as the primary explanation for negative effects of TELs in the context of school-finance...

Applying a Barro-style model of endogenous growth to a fifty-year panel of states from 1957 to 2007, We examine the extent to which expenditures on public education and infrastructure— together with the taxes necessary to support them— enhance or impede the steady-state growth of state and...

This paper offers the first birth-cohort test of the Wilson-Willis model of black-white differences in nonmarital childbearing. Cohort data are uniquely suited to the model, and unlike prior evidence, support the power of the model’s predictions: For blacks, the nonmarital birth share rises,...

This paper is the first to offer an economic model of God and humanity as optimizing agents in the context of concrete belief archetypes (religious ‘contracts’) in Judeo-Christian theology. Data support the model’s unique predictions, despite their otherwise counterintuitive, unlikely...

This study examines reasons for the decline in state funding for public higher education. Prior studies point to Medicaid costs, limitations on tax revenues, income inequality, and Pell grants, but do not estimate their relative importance. Results in this study indicate that income inequality,...

This study tests the hypothesis that balanced-budget rules (BBRs) that restrict public borrowing to investments in public infrastructure increase growth by increasing the productivity of debt, either because investments in public infrastructure are more productive than other uses for which...

We find region-specific complementarity between investments in public infrastructure and education, both k-12 and postsecondary. The complementarity helps to explain how regions capture returns to investments in education even when residents are mobile, and is strong enough for the effect of...

This study is the first to find that mate availability explains much of the race gap in non marital fertility in the United States. Both a general and an education-based metric have strong effects. The novel statistical power arises from difference-indifferences for blacks and whites, multiple...

Evidence from a half century of experience by states identifies nonlinearities in the effects of debt and fiscal policy on growth. Effects are Keynesian for low to moderate levels of debt and stimulus but anti Keynesian for sufficiently high levels of debt or stimulus. Results are broadly...