Finance

State takeover of school districts—a form of political centralization that shifts decision-making power from locally elected leaders to the state—has increased in recent years, often with the purported goal of improving district financial condition. Takeover has affected millions of students… more →

Recent public discussions and legal decisions suggest that school segregation will remain persistent in the United States, but increased transparency may help monitor spending across schools. These circumstances revive an old question: is it possible to achieve an educational system that is… more →

How far is the world away from ensuring that every child obtains the basic skills needed to be internationally competitive? And what would accomplishing this mean for world development? Based on the micro data of international and regional achievement tests, we map achievement onto a common (… more →

School districts in the United States often borrow on the municipal bond market to pay for capital projects. Districts serving economically disadvantaged communities tend to receive lower credit ratings and pay higher interest rates. To remedy this problem, 24 states have established credit… more →

This paper contributes to our understanding of American education politics by exploring when and why states redistribute K-12 education dollars to poorer schools. It does so by examining three explanations for intra-state changes in progressivity: court-ordered finance reforms, political trends… more →

Financing college expenses through an income share agreement (ISA) is an arrangement where the student agrees to pay a fixed percentage of future earned income for a designated period of time in exchange for college funding. Using administrative and survey data for all eligible applicants to a… more →

The Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act passed by Congress in 2020 included significant aid to state education systems. These included direct aid to K-12 districts and higher education institutions, and funds to be used at the discretion of Governors through the Governor’s… more →

Every year millions of students seeking access to federal financial aid complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) application which grants an estimated $234 billion in federal aid in the 2020-21 academic year. Upon receiving students’ FAFSA, the U.S. Department of Education… more →

The equity-efficiency tradeoff and cumulative return theories predict larger returns to school spending in areas with higher previous investment in children. Equity – not efficiency – is therefore used to justify progressive school funding: spending more in communities with fewer financial… more →

School finance reforms are not well defined and are likely more prevalent than the current literature has documented. Using a Bayesian changepoint estimator, we quantitatively identify the years when state education revenues abruptly increased for each state between 1960 and 2008 and then… more →

Knowing how policy-induced salary schedule changes affect teacher recruitment and retention will significantly advance our understanding of how resources matter for K-12 student learning. This study sheds light on this issue by estimating how legislative funding changes in Washington state in… more →

We study the conditional gender wage gap among faculty at public research universities in the U.S. We begin by using a cross-sectional dataset from 2016 to replicate the long-standing finding in research that conditional on rich controls, female faculty earn less than their male colleagues. Next… more →

The formula used to allocate federal funding for state and local special education programs is one of the Individual with Disabilities Act’s most critical components. The formula not only serves as the primary mechanism for dividing available federal dollars among states, it also represents… more →

Over the last two decades, twenty-two states have moved away from traditional defined benefit (DB) pension systems and toward pension plan structures like the defined contribution (DC) plans now prevalent in the private sector. Others are considering such a reform as it is seen as a means of… more →

We estimate the education and earnings returns to enrolling in technical two-year degree programs at community colleges in Missouri. A unique feature of the Missouri context is the presence of a highly regarded, nationally ranked technical college: State Technical College of Missouri (State Tech… more →

We synthesize and critique federal fiscal policy during the Great Recession and Covid-19 pandemic. First, the amount of aid during both crises was inadequate to meet policy goals. Second, the mechanisms used to distribute funds was disconnected from policy goals and provided different levels of… more →

Award displacement occurs when one type of financial aid award directly contributes to the change in the quantity of another award. We explore whether postsecondary institutions displaced awards in response to the Pittsburgh Promise scholarship by capitalizing on the doubling of the maximum… more →

This article reviews the development of my thesis that the California Supreme Court's Serrano decisions, which began in 1971 and sought to disconnect district school spending with local property taxes, led to the fiscal conditions that caused California voters to embrace Proposition 13 in 1978,… more →

While investing in the teacher workforce is central to improving schools, school resources are notoriously limited, forcing school leaders to make difficult decisions on how to prioritize funds. This paper examines a critical input to resource allocation decisions: teacher preferences. Using an… more →