This paper examines the effect of community zoning regulations on allocations and welfare in a two-community model. Each community uses a local property tax to finance public education. Tax rates are determined by majority vote within each community, and individuals choose in which community to...

Many social commentators have raised concerns over the possibility that increased sorting in a society can lead to greater inequality. To investigate this we construct a dynamic model of intergenerational education acquisition, fertility, and marital sorting and parameterize the steady state to...

This paper analyzes within the context of a multicommunity model the effects of several policies that affect the financing of public education. The key features of the model are: (I) individuals differ with respect to income, (ii) individuals choose in which community to reside, (iii)...

We analyze five education finance systems: local, state, foundation, power equalizing with recapture (PER), and power equalizing without recapture (PEN). In a calibrated model, we find that finance systems have large effects on educational resources and equity. The trade-off between equity and...

The non-existence of credit markets implies that initial income is a determinant of who actually obtains an education. We consider the outcome of a process in which income is taxed to provide subsidies for education. and taxes are chosen by majority voting. We characterize the outcome as a...

Many states have or are considering implementing school finance reforms aimed at lessening inequality in the provision of public education across communities. These reforms will tend to have complicated aggregate effects on income distribution, intergenerational income mobility, and welfare. In...

Over the last few decades many US states have made large changes to their systems of financing K-12 education with the explicit objective of providing more equitable educational opportunities. There has been relatively little accompanying analysis, however, examining how these changes might...

Standard models of public education provision predict an implicit transfer of resources from higher income individuals toward lower income individuals. Many studies have documented that public higher education involves a transfer in the reverse direction. We show that this pattern of...

We examine a panel data set for the US states over the period 1950-1990 and use it to assess the effects of growth in personal income and number of students on expenditure on public primary and secondary education. Our analysis suggests that the share of personal income devoted to education is...