New York's School Tax Relief Program, STAR, provides state-funded property tax relief for homeowners. Like a matching grant, STAR changes the price of public services, thereby altering the incentives of voters and school officials and leading to unintended consequences. Using data for New York...

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...

Over the last 50 years, consolidation has dramatically reduced the number of school districts in the United States, and state governments still recommend consolidation, especially in rural school districts, as a way to improve school district efficiency. However, state policies encouraging...

This paper develops a new approach to testing hypotheses about the causes of discrimination in housing sales. We follow previous research by using data from fair housing audits, a matched-pair technique for comparing the treatment of equally qualified black and white home buyers. Our...

This chapter reviews the literature on the boundary between urban economics and local public finance, defined as research that considers both a housing market and the market for local public services. The first part of the chapter considers positive theories. This part presents the consensus...

This study examines the incidence and causes of housing discrimination in qualitative treatment by rental agents, using national audit data sets from the 2000 Housing Discrimination Study (HDS 2000) and the 1989 Housing Discrimination Study (HDS 1989). Using the fixed-effects logit method...

Economists have contributed to the measurement of racial and ethnic discrimination in consumption and to the identification of its causes, especially in housing markets and car sales. To test the hypothesis that discrimination exists, economists have turned to regression analysis and to audits,...