financial intermediation reserve requirements and inside money a general equilibrium analysis abstract reserve requirements are examined in a general equilibrium context the paper develops a simple general equilibrium model that includes diverse opportunities for investment and a role for financial intermediaries two versions of the model are considered one is a thought experiment in which currency serves purely to satisfy legal reserve requirements the other is more realistic the model is used to analyze the comparative static effects of changes in reserve requirements the effects of changes in other parameters of the economy in the presence of reserve requirements and some qualitative issues raised by reserve requirements

liberalization of capital movements and of the domestic financial system this paper analyzes the dynamic impact of a joint liberalization of capital movements and of the domestic financial sector both a simultaneous and a sequential liberalization are examined in an overlapping generations model with a q theory of investment a liberalization generally leads to an initial period of capital inflows followed by capital outflows it also increases investment and causes an overshooting in share prices furthermore the interest rate level before a liberalization will usually not indicate the direction of net capital flows copyright 1992 by the london school of economics and political science

do better schools matter parental valuation of elementary education the evaluation of numerous school reforms requires an understanding of the value of better schools given the difficulty of calculating the relationship between school quality and student outcomes i turn to another method and use house prices to infer the value parents place on school quality i look within school districts at houses located on attendance district boundaries houses then differ only by the elementary school the child attends i thereby effectively remove the variation in neighborhoods taxes and school spending i find that parents are willing to pay 2 5 percent more for a 5 percent increase in test scores this finding is robust to a number of sensitivity checks

valuing english primary schools this paper provides the first empirical evidence for the uk on the effect of primary school performance on property prices we find that on average a one percentage point increase in the neighbourhood proportion of children reaching the government specified target grade pushes up neighbourhood property prices by 0 67 at 2000 property prices we calculate the social valuation of a sustained 1 improvement in primary school performance to be up to 90 per child per year our instrumental variable and semi parametric approach avoids the problems of school quality endogeneity and omitted neighbourhood variables that occur in typical property value models

does marriage really make men more productive this paper presents new descriptive evidence regarding marital pay premiums earned by white males longitudinal data indicate that wages rise after marriage and that cross sectional marriage premiums appear to result from a steepening of the earnings profile data from a company personnelfile that includes information on job grades and supervisor performance ratings reveal large marital status pay differences within a narrow range of occupations managers and professionals and environments a single firm married workers tend to be located in higher paying job grades there are very small pay differentials within grades married men receive higher performance ratings than single men as a result they are much more likely to be promoted controlling for rated performance however eliminates the promotion differential sanders korenman is an assistant professor of economics and public affairs at princeton university and is a faculty associate of the office of population research at princeton university and a research affiliate of the national bureau of economic research nber david neumark is an assistant professor of economics at the university of pennsylvania and a research affiliate of the nber korenman wishes to acknowledge the hewlett foundation and the harvard university center for population studies for financial support the authors are grateful to james medofffor making available an extract from the company personnelfile questions regarding data availability should be directed to professor james

seigniorage banking and the optimal quantity of money abstract this paper discusses seigniorage in an economy with imperfect competition in the banking sector the amount of total seigniorage and its division between the central bank and the banking sector are derived by using the opportunity cost concept of seigniorage the paper analyzes the impact of changes in inflation reserve requirements competition and technology on the division of seigniorage and on the welfare loss and relates the analysis to the concept of the optimal quantity of money

optimal seigniorage and financial liberalization abstract this paper analyzes the effect of financial integration for countries relying on the taxation of their domestic financial system a two country model with overlapping generations and explicit financial intermediation is used goverments derive revenues from seigniorage and set optimally but non cooperatively the rate of inflation and the level of required reserves on bank deposits a financial liberalizations leads to lower reserve ratios higher inflation rates and larger stocks of government debt when the liberalization is anticipated governments may temporarily increase the reserve ratios before the liberalization occurs jel f30 e60

time preference and international lending and borrowing in an overlapping generations model two economies represented by diamond type overlapping generations models and differing only in their pure rates of time preference are joined together capital formation balance of payments behavior and welfare are compared under autarky and openness with a positive natural rate of growth the low time preference country runs a current account surplus in the steady state but not necessarily outside it if preexisting capital is not shiftable between countries integration in the world economy makes the high time preference country worse off in the short run the ranking of stationary utility levels under autarky and openness is ambiguous

using maimonides rule to estimate the effect of class size on scholastic achievement the twelfth century rabbinic scholar maimonides proposed a maximum class size of 40 this same maximum induces a nonlinear and nonmonotonic relationship between grade enrollment and class size in israeli public schools today maimonides rule of 40 is used here to construct instrumental variables estimates of effects of class size on test scores the resulting identiecation strategy can be viewed as an application of donald campbell s regression discontinuity design to the class size question the estimates show that reducing class size induces a signiecant and substantial increase in test scores for fourth and efth graders although not for third graders when asked about their views on class size in surveys parents and teachers generally report that they prefer smaller classes this may be because those involved with teaching believe that smaller classes promote student learning or simply because smaller classes offer a more pleasant environment for the pupils and teachers who are in them mueller chase and walden 1988 social scientists and school administrators also have a longstanding interest in the class size question class size is often thought to be easier to manipulate than other school inputs and it is a variable at the heart of policy debates on school quality and the allocation of school resources in many countries see e g robinson 1990 for the united states ofsted 1995 for the united kingdom and moshel ravid 1995 for israel this broad interest in the consequences of changing class size

valuing school quality using boundary discontinuities abstract existing research shows that house prices respond to local school quality as measured by average test scores however higher test scores could signal higher academic value added or higher ability more sought after intakes in our research we show that both school value added and student prior achievement linked to the background of children in schools affect households demand for education in order to identify these effects we improve the boundary discontinuity regression methodology by matching identical properties across admissions authority boundaries by allowing for boundary effects and spatial trends by re weighting our data towards transactions that are closest to district boundaries by eliminating boundaries that coincide with major geographical features and by submitting our estimates to a number of novel falsification tests our results survive this battery of tests and show that a one standard deviation change in either school average value added or prior achievement raises prices by around 3

the effects of job relocation on spousal careers evidence from military change of station moves we investigate the impact of military job relocation on spousal earnings and employment by creating a unique longitudinal database that tracks over 900 000 military spouses over the period 2001 2012 based on data from two administrative sources military records on personnel and their dependents and social security earnings records this database allows us to estimate the effects of military change of station moves controlling for some key observable characteristics of the service member and household and controlling for individual spouse fixed effects we find that military moves cause a substantial decline in spousal earnings in the year of the move on the order of 2 100 or 14 of average spousal earnings moves also increase the likelihood that the spouse has no earnings for the year we find larger earnings reductions for moves that cross state lines and for older spouses male spouses and those with young children the career costs persist over time and spouses continue to experience significantly lower earnings 2 years after the move this persistence combined with the typical military member experiencing a change of station move every 2 or 3 years may substantially limit the ability of military spouses to accumulate human capital over time jel h56 r23 j45 j16 j64

labor immobility and the formation of gender wage gaps in local markets family ties have an important effect on the wage gap between male and female workers because wives are often more geographically tied to their husband s location which may not be the best market for the wife s skills theory implies a testable inverse relationship between urban size reflecting labor market size and male female wage differentials our results indicate that the wage gap between married men and women narrows with urban size about 17 percent of the wage gap between married men and women can be accounted for by urban size or more fundamentally by geographic immobility due to the family tie constraint

measuring investment in education historic debates about the measurement of capital are even more complicated in the case of education and human capital as extensive research demonstrates education resources are not consistently related to student performance in existing elementary and secondary schools this inefficiency in public schools implies that spending and resource measures do not accurately capture variations in school quality this finding then has clear implications for both education policy and economic research because school inputs are poor policy instruments an alternative policy focus that appears much more productive is performance incentives related to student achievement

why are power couples increasingly concentrated in large metropolitan areas using the panel study of income dynamics psid we test costa and kahn s colocation hypothesis which predicts that power couples couples in which both spouses have college degrees are more likely to migrate to the largest cities than part power couples or power singles we find no support for this hypothesis instead regression analyses suggest that only the education of the husband and not the joint education profile of the couple affects the propensity to migrate to large metropolitan areas the observed location trends are better explained by higher rates of power couple formation in larger metropolitan areas

changes in city and suburban house prices during a period of expected school desegregation during the last decade the courts have given attention to public school segregation which results from residential segregation the precedent was established that when the past actions of school authorities in drawing attendance zones served to create or maintain school segregation desegregation plans using busing could be imposed as a remedy at the same time neighboring suburbs with their own school systems have not been included in the desegregation plans of affected cities thus creating the option of moving to the suburbs in order to avoid busing 2 this paper reports on a study of house prices in columbus ohio and neighboring suburbs during a period of increasingly imminent school desegregation most research on desegregation has examined changes in enrollment patterns such a focus yields only an indication of relative shifts in demand for housing this study directly observed changes in house prices the study used multiple listing service mls data on 5888 sales between may and august for the years 1975 through 1979 year to year comparisons were made which matched six suburbs to contiguous city neighborhoods which have similar types of housing the purpose of the study was to determine the size of any change in the ratio of city to suburban house price differentials and the timing of those changes with respect to major events in the desegregation process year to year changes in the ratio of suburban to city house prices can be expected given a relative increase in demand for suburban houses and a housing supply which is inelastic in the short run following a typical capitalization argument suburban and city house prices should in equilibrium adjust to expected school desegregation such that at the margin households are once again indifferent between a suburban or city location it was hypothesized that the greatest capitalization impact of expected desegregation would be concentrated upon large houses defined to be houses with four or more bed i gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the ohio board of realtors the research has benefited

promise scholarship programs as place making policy evidence from school enrollment and housing prices abstract place based promise scholarship programs which guarantee financial aid for qualifying graduates of a school district have proliferated in recent years using data from multiple sites we compare the evolution of school enrollment and residential real estate prices around program announcement dates within promise eligible and surrounding areas while our estimates indicate that enrollment increased following promise announcements merit based programs generated relative increases in white enrollment housing prices respond strongly in neighborhoods with better primary schools and in the upper half of the housing price distribution we conclude that these programs have important and under studied distributional considerations

domestic politics and the international coordination of fiscal policies abstract this paper investigates the desirability of international fiscal policy coordination in the presence of a domestic political distortion the domestic distortion results from the inability of the current policymaker to enter into a binding agreement with future policymakers about the composition of public spending this distortion generates a bias towards budget deficits international coordination can exacerbate the deficit bias and thus reduce social welfare at home and abroad the reason is that international coordination reduces the cost of running budget deficits and thus enhances the adverse effects of the domestic political distortion

assessing the impact of local taxation on property prices a spatial matching contribution this paper provides empirical evidence on the impact of local taxation on property prices controlling for the local public spending using data on property taxation and real estate transactions over the period 1994 2004 our empirical methodology pairs transactions in the same spatial environments spatial differencing and instrumental variables methodology allow us to compare sales across municipality boundaries and to control for the potential endogeneity of local taxation and public spending our results suggest that the local property tax rate has no impact on property prices while the amount of taxes paid appears to have a negative effect on property price

seigniorage old and new policy issues introduction abstract seigniorage is at the crossroad of many avenues of research a summary survey of older and more recent developments from the static allocative approach in the differential taxation framework to policy analyses of the effects of joining the ems for high deficit countries shows that there may be some disorderly traffic and that definite policy conclusions can hardly be drawn from models which so often neglect relevant markets and variables and in particular the financial sectors and financial assets

seigniorage and the case for national money in countries with high rates of inflation there is typically movement away from the use of the local currency the paper analyzes the costs and benefits of using a local currency with emphasis on the seigniorage foregone by using a foreign money even if it should be desirable for a country to fix its exchange rate it still loses seigniorage if it does not use its own money the case for using a foreign money then turns largely on the superior discipline imposed on domestic policymakers by removing their control over the money supply alternative methods of imposing discipline are discussed estimates of the amount of seigniorage raised by different governments are presented seigniorage amounts in some cases to about 10 percent of government revenue estimates are also presented of both the annual flow and one time stock costs of giving up use of domestic currencies and instead using the dollar the flow cost is typically about 1 percent of gnp and the stock cost is around 10 percent of gnp

comparison of three empirical models of airport congestion pricing abstract we compare three empirical models of airport congestion pricing a standard peak load pricing model with econometrically estimated demand and delay functions morrison 7 morrison and winston 8 a deterministic bottleneck model with traffic adjusting intertemporally to congestion prices vickrey 9 arnott et al 2 and a bottleneck model with time dependent stochastic queuing daniel 4 when implemented using daniel s airport traffic data the models produce similar traffic patterns under weight based pricing but differ significantly under congestion pricing we conclude that structural modeling of stochastic traffic queues and intertemporal substitution is necessary to produce realistic responses of traffic patterns to congestion pricing

valuing school quality via a school choice reform among policymakers educators and economists there remains a strong sometimes heated debate on the extent to which good schools matter this is seen for instance in the strong trend towards establishing accountability systems in education in many countries across the world in this paper in line with some recent studies we value school quality using house prices we however adopt a rather different approach to other work using a policy experiment regarding pupils choice to attend high schools to identify the relationship between house prices and school performance we exploit a change in school choice policy that took place in oslo county in 1997 where the school authorities opened up the possibility for every pupil to apply to any of the high schools in the county without having to live in the school s catchment area the rule that applied before 1997 our estimates show evidence that parents substantially value better performing schools since the sensitivity of housing valuations to school performance falls significantly by over 50 following the school choice reform

financial intermediation and the optimal tax system in this paper a stylized general equilibrium model is constructed to analyze the relative efficiency of taxing financial intermediaries a crucial feature of the model is that tax collection costs are endogenous i e they result from primitive assumptions about information and transaction costs instead of being assumed ad hoc the model provides useful insights into the welfare costs and incidence of banks reserve requirements or equivalently of a tax on deposits in particular it is shown that a tax on bank deposits can be part of an optimal tax system provided banks monopoly power is significant however if the banking industry is perfectly competitive the first dollar of revenue is more efficiently collected by a uniform capital income tax although a strictly positive welfare loss is incurred

local authority fiscal stance and the pattern of residential migration in the north west of england the degree of fiscal mobility present in household migration flows between local authority areas in northwestern england is assessed following an introduction the paper is divided into three sections the first reviews the methodologies of previous attempts to assess the extent of fiscally induced migration noting the dominance of american studies and outlines a choice theoretic structure within which it is possible to model human migration patterns section iii considers the problems inherent in modelling migration flows and section iv presents results for a compound poisson analysis of migration between local authority areas within the four counties of the north west region of england as well as an assessment of the prevalence of fiscal mobility excerpt

reserve requirements and optimal seigniorage abstract this note presents a model of optimizing agents who chose to hold deposits at financial intermediaries which are required to hold fractional reserves of fiat money when the stock of fiat money is expanded the reserve requirement functions as a tax on deposits the combination of reserve requirements and inflation results in a lower steady state utility than a direct tax on deposits the optimal monetary policy when reserves are required is to minimize reserve requirements and inflate without limit the stock of fiat money

swings in commercial and residential land prices in the united states abstract we use a large dataset of land sales dating back to the mid 1990s to construct land price indexes for 23 msas in the united states and for the aggregate of those msas the price indexes show a dramatic increase in both commercial and residential land prices over several years prior to their peak in 2006 2007 and a steep descent since then these fluctuations have exceeded those in well known indexes of home prices and commercial real estate prices because those indexes price a bundle of land and structures this comparison implies that land prices have been more volatile than structures prices over this period this result is a key element of the land leverage hypothesis which holds that home prices and commercial property prices will be more volatile all else equal in areas where land represents a larger share of real estate value

adverse incentives in the taxation of foreigners abstract sovereign policymakers will opt for too much of the public good if their tax falls partially on foreigners they myopically calculate that an increase in public spending is only partially financed by a decrease in home consumption the rest comes from foreign consumption which they do not care about this paper presents an example with seignorage taxes in a two country model with cash in advance constraints the inefficiency is characterized by an inflation bias too much public spending and large fiscal deficits curiously the countries most able to impose such taxes seem to have abstained from doing so

stratification and public utility services in colombia subsidies to households or distortion of housing prices domiciliary public utility services in colombia have a cross subsidy system which charges subsidized rates to the households who live in houses located in strata associated to low wealth levels and taxed rates to the better off we assesses the hypothesis that the flow of subsidies that potentially come from a particular house are discounted by housing market agents so that most of them are transferred to the prices of the houses that generate the subsidies by estimating a hedonic prices model applying a regression discontinuity approach we find that the increment in house value estimated because of subsidies is similar in magnitude to the present value of the flow of subsidies likely effects are found on the rent amount we conclude that subsidies to the poor population through public spending in domiciliary public utility services in colombia is being achieved if anything in a very limited way most of the financial effort on this subject ends up distorting housing relative prices according to socioeconomic strata with an annual cost of up to 0 7 of gdp in supposed gross subsidies to domiciliary public utility services

accounting for heterogeneous private risks in the provision of collective goods controversial compulsory contracting institutions in horizontal hydrofracturing abstract common pool resources are frequently analyzed with a simple template the problem is the tragedy of the commons and the solution is political institutions thus the tragedy of the commons is resolved by governing the commons in this paper we argue that there is also the possibility of a tragedy of governing the commons if political institutions lock participants into a certain pattern of resource use and then there is an exogenous shock say a technological change that increases the risks to one group then the situation may no longer be a classic common pool situation and institutions may actually exacerbate rather than ameliorate distributional conflict we develop a general model showing that whenever there is heterogeneity in private risks some technological innovation could potentially turn a previously stable institution into a source of conflict we take the compelling recent example of horizontal hydrofracturing changing the welfare implications of the institution of compulsory pooling and use a new individual level dataset of landowners affected by compulsory pooling in new york to demonstrate the empirical support for our model

capitalization of interjurisdictional fiscal differentials an alternative approach abstract in virtually every study concerning capitalization of fiscal differentials into property values the unit of observation has been a local jurisdiction or an individual house sale within a jurisdiction urban economic theory suggests that capitalization of fiscal differentials should be most obvious at the border of two jurisdictions housing price differentials between adjacent blocks at the border of two jurisdictions will be used to study capitalization such an approach reduces problems associated with measurement of dis amenities and public services and with the use of a distance variable in urban areas with multiple employment or recreation centers

valuing primary schools in urban china abstract we study the effect of school quality on housing prices in urban china our objective is to provide an estimate of the school quality premium based on the best available data to account for unobserved neighborhood characteristics we adopt the boundary discontinuity design of black 1999 and the matching strategy proposed by fack and grenet 2010 the results suggest that parents value public primary schools that have outstanding records in academic tournaments the school quality premium is highly non linear while a tournament superstar a school above the 90th percentile in tournament performance causes housing prices in its neighborhood to increase by 14 percent or about 430 000 rmb the price difference between non superstar schools is small

school quality and information disclosure evidence from the housing market i introduction tiebout s 1956 theory tying residential sorting patterns to the provision of local public goods provided the foundation for a large and growing literature assessing the relationship between school quality and housing markets many of these studies have used housing prices to directly estimate the monetary value of improvements in student test scores to parents and homeowners few have focused on the role of information in mediating relationships between buyers sellers schools and housing values 1 fewer still have examined the behavior of home sellers and their role in the provision of information on school quality this article takes a step toward filling these gaps in the literature building on the unraveling theory of information disclosure in the industrial organization literature grossman 1981 milgrom 1981 we first investigate the behavior of home sellers in revealing information about local schools we ask whether and how school quality affects the likelihood that a seller will reveal the identity of a property s assigned school in an online real estate listing empirical tests of unraveling are rare as the true quality of a product is typically unobserved the housing market provides a novel context to test this theory if sellers selectively reveal information on schools then information on its own controlling for school quality may have an impact on sales prices if the cost to buyers of obtaining information on school quality is sufficiently high we explore these issues empirically both in a period where the costs of gathering information are relatively high years 2001 and 2002 and in a period where these costs are presumably much lower years 2006 and 2007 between these two periods the mandates of the 2001 no child left behind nclb act coupled with the growth of the internet undoubtedly reduced the cost of information gathering for potential buyers and perhaps also lowered the costs of disclosure for sellers drawing on multiple listing service mls data of residential sales in fairfax county virginia the largest suburb of washington dc our results confirm that sellers of units located in high quality school assignment zones are on average more likely to disclose the school s identity in an online listing an increase of just ten points in an elementary school s passage rate on statewide tests increases the likelihood of information disclosure by a sizeable 5 percentage points in the 2001 2002 period a finding that is robust to a variety of alternative specifications and controls including the addition of real estate agent fixed effects predictably selective disclosure appears to be present but weaker in the 2006 2007 period when the cost of gathering information on school quality was likely lower a ten point increase in test scores yields a 2 to 4 percentage point increase in the likelihood of disclosure our findings of moderate selective disclosure in the latter period hold even when we apply a school boundary discontinuity design and are robust to alternate measures of school quality including measures of adequate yearly progress under nclb in both periods we observe more selective disclosure for single family homes and those with three or more bedrooms presumably families with children than for smaller units we also find more selective disclosure in neighborhoods with high concentrations of young children our results support the findings of several previous studies bayer ferreira and mcmillan 2007 figlio and lucas 2000 confirming that school quality is more important in housing transactions involving families with children than for those without we also investigate the extent to which information disclosure is capitalized in housing prices using school fixed effects to control for school quality we find that information disclosure does not have an independent effect on a home s price

school quality and residential property values evidence from vancouver rezoning abstract this study utilizes changes in the catchment areas of public schools in vancouver british columbia to measure the residential price capitalization of school quality specifications that employ repeat sales methods to control for time invariant neighborhood effects and disaggregated price indexes to capture time varying neighborhood price appreciation reveal significant effects of secondary school performance on residential prices however when we add controls for long run price trends in rezoned areas only prices of residences likely to be purchased by high income families appear to have been affected by changes in school quality induced by rezoning

information shocks and the dynamics of the housing market in this paper we analyze housing market reactions to the release of previously unpublished information on school quality using high quality housing data which precisely bracket the timing of the information shock we investigate housing price dynamics within school catchment areas we find a robust short term housing market reaction to the publication of school quality indicators suggesting that this information was new to the households and that households are willing to pay for better schools the publication effect does not seem to be permanent as prices revert to pre publication levels after two to three months

optimal taxation and optimal tax systems the theory of optimal taxation has for the pas two decades been the reigning normative approach of taxation this paper argues that in its current state optimal tax theory is incomplete as a guide to action concerning many critical issues in tax policy it is incomplete because it has not yet come to terms with taxation as a system of coercively collecting revenues from individuals who will tend to resist the coercive nature of collection taxes implies that the resource cost of implementing a tax system have been and will continue to be a critical determinant of appropriate tax policy the paper first presents the three cornerstone propositions of optimal tax theory and then it discusses the influence of these propositions on recent tax policy developments it concludes by sketching an alternative to optimal taxation called the theory of optimal tax systems which embraces the insights of optimal taxation but also considers the technology of raising taxes and the constraints placed upon tax policy by that technology the optimal tax systems perspective is shown to shed light on the choice of tax instruments the problem of tax evasion and the appropriate tax treatment of capital income this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

how do school report cards affect school choice decisions we estimate the effect of information about school achievement that is disseminated to the public through websites and school report cards on school choice decisions we find that students are more likely to leave their school when public information reveals poor school level performance some parents school choice decisions respond to information soon after it becomes available others including non english speaking parents alter their school choice decisions only in response to information that has been disseminated widely and discussed in the media parents in low income neighbourhoods are most likely to alter their school choice decisions in response to new information jel classification i21 d83 les auteurs evaluent les effets de l information sur la performance des ecoles diffusee au public via les sites web ou les bulletins sur les decisions de choix d ecole il appert que les etudiants sont davantage susceptibles de quitter leur ecole quand l information publique revele sa pauvre performance les decisions de choix d ecole par certains parents repondent a l information tot apres que l information devient disponible d autres incluant les parents dont l anglais n est pas la premiere langue ne modifient leurs decision de choix d ecole qu en reponse a une information qui a ete vastement disseminee et discutee dans les medias les parents des milieux defavorises sont moins susceptibles de modifier leur decision de choix d ecole en reponse a l information nouvelle

priorities in school choice the case of the boston mechanism in barcelona abstract the boston mechanism is a school allocation procedure that is widely used around the world and has been criticized for its incentive problems in order to resolve overdemands for a given school most often priority is given to families living in the neighborhood of the school using a very rich data set on school applications for the case of the boston mechanism in barcelona we exploit an unexpected change in the definition of neighborhood this change allows us to identify that a large fraction of families systematically ranks first high priority schools neighborhood schools in this case additional data on school enrollment decisions and census data shows that some seemingly unsophisticated parents are high income families that can rank hard to get schools because they can afford the outside option of a private school in case they do not get in this sheds light on important inequalities beyond parents lack of sophistication found in the literature

structural estimation of a model of school choices the boston mechanism vs its alternatives we model household choice of schools under the boston mechanism bm and develop a new method applicable to a broad class of mechanisms to fully solve the choice problem even if it is infeasible

public school reform expectations and capitalization what signals quality to homebuyers author affiliation velma zahirovic herbert department of housing and consumer economics university of georgia 213 dawson hall athens ga 30602 3622 usa e mail vherbert uga edu corresponding author geoffrey k turnbull department of economics andrew young school of policy studies georgia state university p o box 3992 atlanta ga 30302 3992 usa e mail gturnbull gsu edu acknowledgment we would like to thank christopher bollinger and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments the authors are responsible for any errors 1 introductioneducation is one of the most important services provided by local governments low test scores high dropout rates high teacher turnover rates and other problems indicate that large urban school districts in the united states serve their students inadequately these deficiencies provide incentives for affluent families to leave cities for the suburbs or to move their children to private schools when these families move urban tax bases and economic activity are reduced when good students move to private schools the average academic quality of the remaining public school students declines which can reduce the quality of the education received in the public schools through influence on peer group effects and declining parental involvement and political support for these reasons education reform remains a key concern in urban areas this paper draws on local education reforms that occurred in east baton rouge parish louisiana in 1996 and 2001 to examine several questions left unresolved in the capitalization literature especially the literature concerned with how housing markets respond to different types of government supplied information about school quality two policy events in the school district provide a rare opportunity in this regard changes ordered by the federal court supervising the school district present natural experiments for observing the extent to which school characteristics are reflected in the housing market more importantly for our purposes the setting and the two policy events themselves highlight the roles of home owners expectations on measured capitalization as a legacy of a 40 year desegregation lawsuit the local school system was under direct federal court control for more than 15 years in the years preceding our first policy event students were randomly assigned to individual schools in an effort to equalize racial composition a method that eliminated school quality as a location specific house attribute e g it was not unusual for different children in the same family to attend different schools 1 in a surprise move in the summer of 1996 the presiding judge ordered the elimination of random school assignment in favor of stable attendance zones thereby creating a direct tie between house location and school quality this change from random to zone school assignment represents a natural experiment and an opportunity to observe how the local housing market values the policy change further in light of the history of the 40 year federal lawsuit and 15 years of direct court control of the local school system the public had little confidence in the federal court s ability to improve education quality the overwhelming defeat of a major school tax referendum following the court s creation of school attendance zones is evidence of this lack of confidence this is precisely the type of environment in which we expect to find little or no systematic capitalization of measured school quality differences there is evidence that public confidence in the school system improved during the next few years enrollments ceased their inexorable declines and stabilized within a few years and more importantly voters passed a major school tax referendum at that time as well both observations signal an important reversal in public opinion regarding the perceived viability of school reform

information sharing and tax competition among governments abstract the residence based principle has been proposed as a second best measure to the full international coordination of capital tax policies this system requires that tax authorities have full information about the foreign investments of their residents however the degree of information transmission among governments can be considered as a strategic variable we show that under some features of the tax system there will not be any information sharing while there are institutional arrangements under which governments may transmit partial information for strategic purposes we also show that full information sharing is not necessarily a pareto optimum

does additional spending help urban schools an evaluation using boundary discontinuities this study exploits spatial anomalies in school funding policy in england to provide new evidence on the impact of resources on student achievement in urban areas anomalies arise because the funding allocated to local education authorities lea depends through a funding formula on the additional educational needs of its population and prices in the district however the money each school receives from its lea is not necessarily related to the school s own specific local conditions and constraints this implies that neighbouring schools with similar intakes operating in the same labour market facing similar prices but in different leas can receive very different incomes we find that these funding disparities give rise to sizeable differences in pupil attainment in national tests at the end of primary school showing that school resources have an important role to play in improving educational attainment especially for lower socio economic groups the design is geographical boundary discontinuity design which compares neighbouring schools matched on a proxy for additional educational needs of its students free school meal entitlement fsm in adjacent districts the key identification requirement is one of conditional ignorability of the level of lea grant where conditioning is on geographical location of schools and their proportion of fsm children

the effect of school capital investments on local housing markets and household sorting in california abstractin this paper i investigate what effect school capital investments have on housing values and household location choice in the context of the tiebout model this research identifies an exogenous variation in school capital investments by exploiting the lottery allocation of entitlement to an interest free construction bond among districts in california although the lottery is exogenous additional non lottery allocation complicates identification this paper develops an empirical model based on sample selection methods in order to create a counterfactual state in which additional non lottery allocation would not have existed i find that receiving the interest free construction bond increases school capital expenditure and housing values at the district level i view the increase in housing values as the capitalization of school capital investments i find little evidence for the effect of the interest free construction bond on household sorting and student s academic outcomes

the value of school in urban china a spatial quantile regression with housing transactions in beijing this study adopts microdata of individual housing transactions in beijing to explore the value that households place on high quality schools it is among the first to match exactly the housing unit

reserve requirements and the inflation tax the inflation tax on currency and required bank reserves is modeled in a general equilibrium setting by specifying a transactions technology in which currency and demand deposits allow agents to economize on time spent transacting in the goods market revenue maximizing conditions for the nominal interest rate and reserve ratio are analyzed for any given revenue requirement less than the revenue maximizing level minimization of the welfare costs of inflationary finance results in the choice of a combination of the interest rate and reserve ratio that lies on a set of tangency points formed by iso revenue and iso welfare curves copyright 1989 by ohio state university press

property tax shifting under imperfect competition the hedonic price models are commonly used to empirically assess the degree to which property taxes are shifted from property owners to property renters the findings of these studies vary sporadically in terms of the degree of tax shifting the competitiveness of housing markets may significantly influence the degree of tax shifting in this article we allow a nonzero price cost markup in the hedonic price equation and examine the impact of market power on property tax shifting in our case study we examine the property specific characteristics occupancy record and local property tax associated with hundreds of managed rental properties in central new hampshire the results show that depending on the degree of market power exercised by a property management firm the anti competitive structure of the market may significantly contribute to property tax shifting from property owners to property renters