We investigate the number and size of local political jurisdictions are determined, by focusing on the tradeoff between the benefits of economies of scale and the costs of a heterogeneous population. We consider heterogeneity in income, race, ethnicity, and religion, and we test the model using...

The recent financial crisis had a profound effect on both public and private universities, which faced shrinking endowments, declining charitable contributions, and reductions in government support. Universities responded to these stresses in different ways. This volume presents new evidence on...

When parents have some form of school choice, schools should want to hire and keep teachers who help them attract students. Thus, parental freedom to choose schools may affect how schools structure teaching jobs and teachers' pay. This paper investigates whether schools that face choice-based...

Tiebout choice among districts is the most powerful market force in American public education. Naive estimates of its effects are biased by endogenous district formation. I derive instruments from the natural boundaries in a metropolitan area. My results suggest that metropolitan areas with...

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has declared school voucher programs constitutional, the many unanswered questions concerning the potential effects of school choice will become especially pressing. Contributors to this volume draw on state-of-the-art economic methods to answer some of these...

Previous work (Hoxby and Avery 2014) shows that low-income higher achievers tend not to apply to selective colleges despite being extremely likely to be admitted with financial aid so generous that they would pay less than they do to attend the non-selective schools they usually attend. The...

New empirical work shows the degree of competition among public providers of local public goods or between public and private providers of local public goods matters. This evidence needs a theory of the local public goods producer. Tiebout's hypothesis spawned a literature that gives local...

I construct an agency model of local public goods producers with special reference to public schools. The model assumes that households make Tiebout choices among jurisdictions, but it has more realistic assumptions about information and the cost of residential mobility. I examine producers'...