Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972), allowed the Old Order Amish to limit their children’s education to eight grades in private, one-room schools that resemble those of the nineteenth century. An important factual claim in Yoder was that Amish education was as effective as that provided by...

School districts have more influence on home buyers’ choices than any other local-government unit, yet hardly anyone knows why they exist. “Making the Grade” explains the development of American school districts and advances an economic argument for their continued existence. In the...

Fiscal zoning is the practice of using local land-use regulation to preserve and possibly enhance the local property tax base. Economists agree that if localities can conduct "perfect zoning," which effectively makes all real estate development decisions subject to a review that balances its...

This essay constitutes chapter 6 of my forthcoming book, Zoning Rules! The Economics of Land Use Regulation, which the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy will publish in 2015. This chapter offers a formal structure with which to analyze land use controversies and an evaluation of its relevance....

This is a preliminary chapter of my book in progress, tentatively titled The New Economics of Zoning Laws. This chapter selectively surveys court decisions on zoning over the past century. I offer new evidence on Nectow v. Cambridge (1927), the first case in which the US Supreme Court overturned...

Economists often casually assume that a school district and a city that share the same name also share the same territory, but in fact exactly congruent boundaries are rare. Using the overlap of school district and municipal boundaries available on Google Earth, I find that about two-thirds of...

This essay is the introduction to a volume commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Tiebout's A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures, which was first published in the Journal of Political Economy in October 1956. It presents biographical and contextual information about Charles Tiebout, who died...

The real way to stop the abuse of eminent domain is not to forbid its use for economic development, but to make sure that the funds so designated could have been used by the locality for other purposes that likely would have had broader public support and benefits

This article argues that the use of eminent domain that was at issue in Poletown [304 N.W.2d 455 (Mich. 1981)] was flawed by fiscal constraints. The funding for the project, which leveled a thickly-settled neighborhood of Detroit in order to build an automobile plant, was provided almost...

This paper explores for economists how the school-finance litigation movement, which began with Serrano v. Priest in 1971, ought to be characterized in economic models. Its primary message is that this has become a national movement, not one confined to individual states. Economists should be...