In the State of New Jersey, any child between the age of five and eighteen has the constitutional right to a thorough and efficient education. The State of New Jersey also has one of the country's most rigid policies regarding a balanced budget come fiscal end. When state and local revenues took...

During the Great Recession and its aftermath, state and local governments’ revenue streams dried up due to diminished taxes. Budget cuts affected many aspects of government; in this paper, we investigate whether (and how) local school districts modified their funding and taxing decisions in...

Despite education's fundamental role in human capital formation and growth, there is no research that examines the effect of the Great Recession (or any other recession) on schools. Our paper begins to fill this gap. Exploiting detailed data on school finance indicators and an analysis of trend...

Schools play a crucial role in human capital development, and were one of the many elements of government adversely affected by the Great Recession. Using a rich panel data set of New York State school districts and a trend-shift analysis, we examine how the funding and expenditure dynamics of...

This paper's study of Connecticut's education costs can serve as the foundation of an equitable and adequate state education aid formula. To the best of the author's knowledge, it is the first cost function study of Connecticut public K–12 education. The author uses a regression model to...

This research examines the effect of accountability threats for low performing schools on resource allocation decisions and provides evidence that schools act with strategic behavior only when the accountability pressure is high. We used a generalization of a traditional regression discontinuity...

School districts across the U.S. have adopted funding policies designed to distribute resources more equitably across schools. However, schools are also increasing external fundraising efforts to supplement district budget allocations. We document the interaction between funding policies and...

We study the effects of increased school spending in rural American school districts by leveraging the introduction and subsequent expansion of Wisconsin's Sparsity Aid Program. We find that the program, which provides additional state funding to small and isolated school districts, increased...

After years of stagnation and political cataclysms, Georgia tried to recover by launching radical economic and political reforms starting in 2004. The results of the reforms appeared to be impressive. The country's GDP has more than doubled; the total volume of bank deposits is five times what it...

We quantify the effect of school voucher spending on initial earnings. We use administrative data on the monetary resources received by schools from a targeted voucher program implemented in Chile. We merge this dataset with education and labor market administrative records for the universe of...