Essays on the Economics of Education and Fiscal Federalism

Essays on the Economics of Education and Fiscal Federalism PDF Author: David Coyne
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
This dissertation focuses on topics related to public finance and explores the incidence of policies on residents and firms. Chapter 1 asks how school districts choose to allocate their limited funding across constituent schools. It finds that school accountability policies can explain some of the variation in within-district funding, specifically finding that districts target schools that are relatively close to school accountability rating thresholds, which are based on the percent of students passing a standardized achievement test in the Texas sample analyzed. It predicts that a typical school receives 2.5 percent more per pupil funding for each percentage point closer it is to a rating threshold. This effectively redistributes funding away from schools who are not close to these rating thresholds, including very high- and very low-performing schools. Chapter 2 asks how local fiscal outcomes respond to changes in federal deductibility of state and local taxes. It finds that raising the tax price of state and locally provided goods and services by 1 percent through limiting the deduction lowers the use of local deductible taxes by 3.5 percent and lowers the total expenditures of local governments by over 2 percent. It further finds that completely cutting the deduction for state and local taxes would not disproportionately hurt resource-poor areas, making such limits potentially progressive policy options. Chapter 3 analyzes how taxes are passed through to consumers around state borders in the context of state motor fuels taxes. Using high frequency price data and precise location data for gas stations it compares how prices change in response to changes in tax rates both near state borders and on the interior of states. It finds that stations near a border pass through about 43 percentage points less of a tax than those on the interior of a state. Furthermore, it shows evidence of tax spillovers, with stations near a border passing through about 35 percent of tax changes from neighboring states. The results suggest that the incidence of a state motor fuels tax falls relatively more heavily on residents towards the interior of a state and on firms closer to state borders.

Essays on the Economics of Education and Fiscal Federalism

Essays on the Economics of Education and Fiscal Federalism PDF Author: David Coyne
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
This dissertation focuses on topics related to public finance and explores the incidence of policies on residents and firms. Chapter 1 asks how school districts choose to allocate their limited funding across constituent schools. It finds that school accountability policies can explain some of the variation in within-district funding, specifically finding that districts target schools that are relatively close to school accountability rating thresholds, which are based on the percent of students passing a standardized achievement test in the Texas sample analyzed. It predicts that a typical school receives 2.5 percent more per pupil funding for each percentage point closer it is to a rating threshold. This effectively redistributes funding away from schools who are not close to these rating thresholds, including very high- and very low-performing schools. Chapter 2 asks how local fiscal outcomes respond to changes in federal deductibility of state and local taxes. It finds that raising the tax price of state and locally provided goods and services by 1 percent through limiting the deduction lowers the use of local deductible taxes by 3.5 percent and lowers the total expenditures of local governments by over 2 percent. It further finds that completely cutting the deduction for state and local taxes would not disproportionately hurt resource-poor areas, making such limits potentially progressive policy options. Chapter 3 analyzes how taxes are passed through to consumers around state borders in the context of state motor fuels taxes. Using high frequency price data and precise location data for gas stations it compares how prices change in response to changes in tax rates both near state borders and on the interior of states. It finds that stations near a border pass through about 43 percentage points less of a tax than those on the interior of a state. Furthermore, it shows evidence of tax spillovers, with stations near a border passing through about 35 percent of tax changes from neighboring states. The results suggest that the incidence of a state motor fuels tax falls relatively more heavily on residents towards the interior of a state and on firms closer to state borders.

Essays in Fiscal Federalism

Essays in Fiscal Federalism PDF Author: Malte Hübner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Essays on the Economics of Education

Essays on the Economics of Education PDF Author: Emily P. Hoffman
Publisher: W. E. Upjohn Institute
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Fiscal Federalism and Its Impact on Economic Activity, Public Investment and the Performance of Educational Systems

Fiscal Federalism and Its Impact on Economic Activity, Public Investment and the Performance of Educational Systems PDF Author: Hansjörg Blöchliger
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 62

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The Challenge of Fiscal Disparities for State and Local Governments

The Challenge of Fiscal Disparities for State and Local Governments PDF Author: Helen F. Ladd
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
A collection of 25 years of policy-oriented research in the area of state and local public finance by a professor of public studies and economics at Duke University. Part I addresses fiscal disparities across local jurisdictions and the design of intergovernmental aid programs, and Part II examines the design of taxes and tax structures, with material on tax limitation measures. Part III deals with the interaction between taxes and land use, including fiscal effects of rapid population growth and the use of tax subsidies to promote growth in urban areas. Part IV focuses on education finance. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Essays on the Economics of Education

Essays on the Economics of Education PDF Author: Yusuke Jinnai
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Bonuses (Employee fringe benefits)
Languages : en
Pages : 117

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Book Description
"Although numerous reforms for improving public education have been proposed in the United States, the effects of implemented programs remain controversial. Focusing on recent reform policies, my dissertation examines the impact of school choice, educational accountability, and teacher performance-pay programs on student achievement. Chapter One analyzes the effects of introducing charter schools, fast-growing school-choice programs, on students at neighboring traditional public schools. Unlike prior work, which estimates the effects at the school level, this study examines the impact at the grade level by exploiting the fact that charter schools expand their grade ranges over time. I define direct impact as the impact on traditional-school students in overlapping grades and indirect impact as the impact on those in non-overlapping grades. Using student-level panel data from North Carolina, this study shows that the entry of charter schools generates a positive and significant direct impact on student achievement. Moreover, I demonstrate that one-quarter of the positive direct impact is driven by student sorting while three-quarters result from competition. Chapter Two presents evidence from a regression-discontinuity analysis of North Carolina's accountability program, in which teachers are awarded an additional cash bonus for improving their students' achievement. Results show that teachers who failed to reach an expected benchmark for their students' achievement, resulting in no bonuses, performed significantly better in the subsequent year than those who reached this benchmark and thus received a bonus. Moreover, the results demonstrate that such impact disappeared once the state government repealed the pay scheme - another indication that teachers actively respond to monetary bonuses. Chapter Three examines the performance-pay program from a different viewpoint. To date, no studies in this literature have examined the potentially negative effects of repealing incentive bonuses. This chapter exploits North Carolina's policy changes, which first reduced and finally repealed its teacher incentive bonuses. This paper shows that, as a result, student achievement at the lowest-performing schools significantly decreased after the reduction and further decreased after the repeal of the bonus. These findings illustrate that once incentives are introduced it is not cost-free to reduce or remove them"--Pages v-vi.

Essays on the Economics of Education

Essays on the Economics of Education PDF Author: Margaret Leighton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This thesis is composed of three chapters. The first two chapters consider specific aspects of the educational path and how these relate to, in the first case, earnings and occupation choice and, in the second, progress through school. The third chapter studies how variations in municipal finance affect investments in education. The first chapter of this thesis estimates the importance of two aspects of human capital accumulation: the acquisition of job-related skills, and the student's discovery of his relative abilities across disciplines. Specifically, we measure whether additional years of multi-disciplinary education help students make a better choice of specialization, and at what cost in foregone specialized human capital. We document that, in the cross section, students who choose their major later are more likely to change fields on the labor market. We then build and estimate a dynamic model of college education which captures the tradeoff between discovering comparative advantage and acquiring occupation-specific skills. Estimates suggest that delaying specialization is informative, although noisy. Working in the field of comparative advantage accounts for up to 20% of a well-matched worker's earnings. While education is transferable across fields with only a 10% penalty, workers who wish to change fields incur a large, one-time cost. The second chapter considers the impact of automatically promoting young children from one grade level to the next on retention and grade progression in primary school. Exploiting variation in grade repetition practices in Brazil, we study the effect of automatic promotion cycles on grade attainment and academic persistence of primary school children. The dynamic policy environment allows us to estimate the impact of the policy when applied at different times during schooling, both in the short term and as children exposed to the policy progress through primary school. We find that automatic promotion increases grade attainment: one year of exposure to the policy is associated with 3 students out of 100 studying one grade level above where they would be absent the policy. This effect persists over time, and cumulates with further exposure to the policy. The third chapter moves away from students to focus on education infrastructure. In the paper we seek to answer the question of how transfers from the federal government in Brazil affect both education spending and the resources available for education at the municipal level. We find that increased transfers lead to an immediate rise in current and capital spending. These increases are focused on education and welfare expenditure in poorer municipalities, while richer municipalities expand capital spending in the transport and housing sectors. Furthermore, particularly in wealthier municipalities, increases in transfers cause a short-term increase in local tax revenues. Positive transfer shocks are associated with increases in the number of teachers and, to a lesser extent, the number of classrooms. Transfers are also associated with substantial re-allocation of resources across schools offering classes at different levels, with secondary schools and schools teaching senior primary grades expanding at the expense of junior primary schools.

Fiscal Federalism 2014 Making Decentralisation Work

Fiscal Federalism 2014 Making Decentralisation Work PDF Author: OECD
Publisher: OECD Publishing
ISBN: 9264204571
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
This book provides an overview on recent trends and policies in intergovernmental fiscal relations and sub-central govenrment.

Essays on the Economics of Education

Essays on the Economics of Education PDF Author: My Tra Nguyen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Essays on the Economics of Education

Essays on the Economics of Education PDF Author: Richard Wells Patterson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 135

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Book Description
This dissertation examines various economic factors that influence student academic performance. In the first essay, I explore the role of behavioral factors in educational performance by testing whether time-management tools can improve academic outcomes for online students. I design three software tools including (1) a commitment device that allows students to pre-commit to time limits on distracting Internet activities, (2) a reminder tool that is triggered by time spent on distracting websites, and (3) a focusing tool that allows students to block distracting sites when they go to the course website. I test the impact of these tools in a large-scale randomized experiment (n=657) conducted in a massive open online course (MOOC) hosted by Stanford University. Relative to students in the control group, students in the commitment device treatment spend 24% more time working on the course, receive course grades that are 0.29 standard deviations higher, and are 40% more likely to complete the course. In contrast, outcomes for students in the reminder and focusing treatments are not statistically distinguishable from the control. These results suggest that tools designed to address procrastination can have a significant impact on online student performance. In the second essay, I examine whether trends in parenting time could help explain the black-white test score gap. I use data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) to examine the patterns in the time black and white children receive from mothers at each age between birth and age 14 and compare these patterns to corresponding test-score gaps documented in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K). I observe that black children spend significantly less time with their mothers than white children in the first years of life and that differences are concentrated in activities that may be especially important during these years. Differences in parenting time, however, rapidly decline with age. Contrastingly, when socioeconomic variables are controlled, black-white test score gaps are small in kindergarten, but then grow over time. The results of this study suggest that contemporaneous differences in parent time are unlikely to be a significant factor in black-white test score trends. In the third essay, coauthored with Jordan Matsudaira, I study whether charter school unionization impacts student academic outcomes. We use administrative school-level data coupled with data on the timing of union recognition collected via our own public records requests (PRR) and records of unionization from the state Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) to construct difference-in-difference estimates the of the impact of teacher unionization on student outcomes. We find that unionization has a positive and statically significant impact on student math performance and a positive but only marginally significant impact on english performance. In our preferred estimates, we find that unions increase average grade-level math test scores by 0.17-0.21 standard deviations (SD) and English scores by 0.06-0.08 SD. These estimates allow us to rule out even modest negative effects of unionization on student academic outcomes.