This study explores the effects of state-imposed school district tax and expenditure limits (TELs) on contributions and total revenues for education-supporting nonprofits. These nonprofits provide resources and services to schools
May 2025
Dollars, Desks, and Development: The Impact of Local Sales Tax Revenue Redistribution on Recipient Programs in North Carolina
North Carolina identified local sales tax leakage as a contributor to local inequity and created a revenue-sharing pool funded by local sales taxes, where revenues are earmarked for schools, economic
Dec 2024
Long COVID and financial hardship: A disaggregated analysis at income and education levels
Objectives To examine how long COVID is associated with financial hardship (food insecurity, inability to pay bills, or threat of losing service) across income and education levels, and to assess
Feb 2024
Measuring Family Income and Student Risk in Public Schools
There is now clear evidence that family income is not measured accurately by free and reduced-price meal (FRM) enrollment. But with decades of policy infrastructure built around using FRM enrollment
Jan 2024
Local Responses to School Finance Equalization: Wealth Or Place?
Over the past 50 years, a combination of court cases and legislative actions has greatly reduced the variance in revenues across school districts within states by removing local property tax
Jan 2024
Plugging the Tax Leak: An Analysis of North Carolina’s Local Sales Tax Redistribution Policy
Amid rising concerns over the urban-rural divide, taxation equity, revenue generation, and local tax leakage, several states are contemplating measures to support jurisdictions perceived as bearing the brunt of evolving
Aug 2023
Natural Resource Exploitation and Military Spending
Why do some states allocate more resources to their military than others? Governments are likely to perceive acute threats to their authority and legitimacy when they face insurgencies in which
Jun 2023
The Heterogeneous and Longer-Term Effects of the Great Recession on Public School District Finances
During the Great Recession and in the years that immediately followed, previous research has well-documented that U.S. public school districts receiving larger shares of their funding from state governments experienced
May 2023
The Role of Property Assessment Oversight in School Finance Inequality
This paper explores an under-studied channel for school finance inequality: property assessment. School districts have historically relied on local tax revenues (typically property taxes) to fund schools, which can generate
Mar 2023
High School Student Achievement and College Enrollment in the Absence of School Improvement Interventions: Evidence from Kentucky
One challenge of accountability in education is balancing local discretion over the use of resources with state and federal constraints designed to improve performance. This study isolates the impact of
