Arguments in favor of school choice depend on the idea that competition between schools improves the quality of education. However, we have almost no empirical evidence on whether competition actually affects school quality. In this study, I examine the effects of inter-school competition on...

Public school finance equalization programs can be characterized by the change they impose on the tax price of an additional dollar of local school spending. I calculate the tax price of spending for each school district in the United States for 1972, 1982, and 1992. I find that using the actual...

Peer effects are potentially important for understanding the optimal organization of schools, jobs, and neighborhoods, but finding evidence is difficult because people are selected into peer groups based, in part, on their unobservable characteristics. I identify the effects of peers whom a...

This paper investigates whether schools that face stronger choice-based incentives have greater demand for certain teacher characteristics and (if so) which teacher characteristics. Schools that face choice-based incentives should demand teachers who raise a schools' ability to attract students....

We investigate how the number and size of local political jurisdictions in an area is determined. Our model focuses 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...

Three tax credits benefit households who pay tuition and fees for higher education. The credits have been justified as an investment: generating more educated people and thus more earnings and externalities associated with education. The credits have also been justified purely as tax cuts to...

School finance schemes control the allocation of $370 billion a year in the United States, but their economics are poorly understood. We examine an illuminating example: Texas' Robin Hood' scheme, which was enacted in 1994, allocates about $30 billion a year, and is currently collapsing and...

The incomes and wages of college-educated Americans have become significantly more dispersed since 1970. This paper attempts to decompose this growing dispersion into three possible sources of growth. The first source, or extensive margin,' is the increasing demographic diversity of people who...

This paper presents theoretical and empirical evidence demonstrating the ways in which" the changing market structure of American higher education from 1940 to the present affected" college prices and college quality. Over this period, the market for baccalaureate education" became significantly...

I use natural population variation to identify the effects of class size and composition on student achievement. I isolate the credibly random component of population variation in each grade and school district and use this component to generate instrumental variables for class size and...