In the past two decades, litigation in many U.S. states has triggered educational reform movements designed to reduce the inequalities in educational expenditures across school districts. This paper uses a panel data set across all the states from 1970-1990 to examine the role of litigation and...

In 1995, the Michigan state government centralized a school finance system by removing local discretion on school revenue. The theoretical framework says that centralization has the price and income effects on the pivotal voter's demand for school spending, probably reducing overall spending...

Tax deductions and tax credits for educational expenditures are proliferating across states. For example, in Minnesota taxpayers can deduct up to $1625 for elementary students or $2500 for secondary students for tuition, textbooks, transportation, academic summer camps, and summer school....

In this article we examine the relationship between property tax rates and tax base growth in southeast Michigan using data for all 152 communities in the five counties surrounding Detroit over the 1983–2002 period. To address endogeneity, we exploit the adoption of Proposal A in 1994, which...

In our current challenging budgetary environment, school closures remain a potentially attractive choice. With a large panel of Illinois schools from 1991 to 2005, I investigate which factors contribute to school closures. Among elementary schools, declining enrolments and rural locations...

This paper analyzes higher education funding in Germany from a distributional perspective. For this, I first compare the quantitative importance of different funding instruments, from free tuition to subsidized health insurance for students. I show that free tuition is, by far, the most...

We study human capital accumulation in an environment of competitive search. Given that unemployed workers can default on their education loans, skilled individuals with a larger debt burden prefer riskier but better paid careers than is socially desirable. A higher level of employment risk in...

Der vorliegende Artikel unterzieht das Argument der externen Effekte im Bildungsbereich einer kritischen Prüfung und zeigt mögliche Konsequenzen für die Rechtfertigung öffentlicher Bildungsfinanzierung auf. Hierzu erfolgt zunächst eine differenzierte Betrachtung des "Gutes" Bildung. Daran...

We analyse the adjustment of public education spending in response to rapidly decreasing student cohorts in East Germany where birth rates collapsed after German reunification. Previous results from the literature based on data from more stable demographic periods suggest that public resources...

Higher education institutions are an essential, endogenous element of economic development and take part in resolving global issues. Their utilitarian role, however, may be greatly limited as a result of improper ways of financing science and didactics. The prevailing mechanism of financing...