This paper studies racial and ethnic discrimination in discrete choices by real estate brokers using national audit data from the 2000 Housing Discrimination Study. It uses a fixed effects logit model to estimate the probability that discrimination occurs and to study the causes of...

In June 2003 the New York State Court of Appeals altered the education-finance landscape with its ruling in Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. New York. This ruling called for “[r]eforms to the current system of financing school funding” designed to ensure “that every school in New York City...

New York State provides aid to local schools through a confusing maze of aid programs that are, according to many commentators, unfair to the neediest school districts, often defined as those with many students who are poor or otherwise "at risk." For example, New York City, which, by any...

The last few years have witnessed a quantum leap in the enforcement of fair housing and fair lending legislation. The 1988 Fair Housing Amendments Act gave newe enforcement powers to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Department of Justice. For example, HUD can...

Performance standards have been at the center of recent debates on educational reform. Many states have implemented new performance standards, often based on student test scores, and a district's state aid is sometimes linked to its success in meeting the standards. This focus on performance is...

In 2001, the homeownership rate in the United States reached 67.8 percent--an all-time high. The benefits of homeownership were not evenly spread across ethnic groups, however. In fact, the homeownership rate was 74.3 percent for non-Hispanic whites, 48.4 percent for non-Hispanic blacks, and...

This paper provides a guide to statistically based methods for estimating the extra costs of educating disadvantaged students, shows how these methods are related, and compares state aid programs that account for these costs in different ways. We show how pupil weights, which are included in...

This paper examines whether methodological deficiencies in the literature on discrimination in small business credit markets have a significant impact on the estimation of discrimination and provides a preliminary investigation into the causes of discrimination in these markets. We find...

Hedonic regressions with house value as the dependent vaqriable are widely used to study the value of public services and amenities. This paper builds on the theory of household bidding and sorting to derive a bid function envelope, which provides a form for these regressions. This approach uses...

Thousands of schools around the country have implemented whole-school reform programs to boost student performance. This paper uses quasi-experimental methods to estimate the impact of whole-school reform on students' reading performance in New York City, where various reform programs were...