Equalizing aid can be used by the federal government to equalize fiscal outcomes or resources among subnational governments or by states to equalize outcomes or resources among local governments. The primary focus of this paper is on financial equity.

This paper investigates the incidence of development fees and special assessments, popular ways to finance new public infrastructure. Development fees are often seen as a way to shift the burden of new infrastructure onto the new residents that require it. This view is only partially right. Even...

State education officials have implemented performance standards, but state education aid has not kept up. By focusing on the relationship between spending and property wealth, most existing aid formulas only partially account for cost differences across districts and, thus, fail to fully...

This paper estimates the capitalization of school district consolidation into housing prices in New York State between 1990 and 2000. We utilize first differencing and 2SLS to account for district heterogeneity and possible endogeneity of the consolidation decision. We find that consolidation...

A consideration of whether the quality of public service is a source of tax shifting among mobile renters and a conclusion that property tax paid on rental housing is, on average, not a benefit tax.

Explains the measures of city fiscal condition and of state and federal assistance to cities. Presents a model of state assistance to cities and tests it using data for 70 major central cities in 1982.