This paper draws on a conceptual analysis of discrimination to improve the methodology for estimating discrimination in small-business credit markets and to provide some evidence about the possible causes of discrimination in these markets. Using a variety of statistical enhancements to existing...

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 explores (dis-)economies of scale in property value assessment via cooperative agreements among small tax assessing jurisdictions without consolidation. New York State incentivizes small neighboring towns to unify their assessment function while maintaining respective tax authority;...

This study examines 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...

Municipal bond ratings give investors information about bonds' default probabilities. They also affect societal objectives by altering the cost of public infrastructure but are not regulated. This paper explores the possibility that these ratings involve behavior analogous to redlining, which is...

The responsibility for uncovering discrimination falls on both scholars and civil rights enforcement officials. Scholars ask whether discrimination exists and why it arises; enforcement officials ask whether particular firms are discriminating. This article investigates the points of commonality...

"This book covers a wide range of topics in education finance. It is designed to introduce the literature on education finance to scholars and prospective scholars and can be used as a textbook for a graduate-level education finance class. The topics in the book include the incidence of the...