We estimate whether federal aid for state and local governments played a role in advancing population testing for COVID-19 and the administration of vaccines. To overcome biases that can result from the endogeneity of federal aid allocations, we use an instrumental-variables estimator reliant on...

Using data on U.S. state and federal taxes and transfers over a quarter century, we estimate a regression model that yields the marginal effect of any shift of market income share from one quintile to another on the entire post tax, post-transfer income distribution. We identify exogenous income...

Elderly have been increasingly targeted as a group to enhance economic development and the tax base in communities. While recent literature on elderly migration tends to focus on how elderly migration patterns are influenced by state fiscal variables, the reverse effect from elderly population...

This volume was prepared by Benedikt Siegler while working at the Center for the Economics of Education of the Ifo Institute. It was completed in June 2014 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich (LMU) in November 2014. The thesis includes...

This paper provides new evidence on the effect of school construction projects on home prices, academic achievement, and public school enrollment. Taking advantage of the staggered implementation of a comprehensive school construction project in a poor urban district, we find that, by six years...

This paper describes the US Unemployment Insurance (UI) in particular the federal-state partnership in governance, funding and policy making. It discusses 'national interest' as defined by the Federal authorities in relation to UI: income support, economic and employment stabilization and...

In the wake of the Affordable Care Act, some US states expanded Medicaid eligibility to low-income, working-age adults while others did not. This study investigates whether this divergence induces migration across state borders to obtain Medicaid, especially in border regions of expansion...

The United States faces challenging budgetary prospects, as do most other OECD countries. The federal budget deficit widened considerably during the recession, reaching about 10% of GDP in both 2009 and 2010, reflecting the operation of automatic stabilizers and the policy response to the...

This paper studies the impact of the First Great Migration on children. We use the complete-count 1940 Census to estimate selection-corrected place effects on education for children of Black migrants. On average, Black children gained 0.8 years of schooling (12 percent) by moving from the South...

State Public Pension funds have increased their portfolios into riskier alternative investments to meet their annual required contributions (ARC). Our paper uses The Public Plans Data (PPD) to analyze the differences in alternative investments for 2001 to 2013 by Democrats and Republican...