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Working Paper
The role of economic, fiscal, and financial shocks in the evolution of public sector pension funding
Many studies have documented the pervasive underfunding of public sector pension plans in the United States in recent years. The deterioration of the funded status of public pension plans coincided with severe fiscal crises that state and local governments experienced in the 2000s. This development has led to a suspicion that state and local governments have decreased employer pension contributions as a backdoor means of running fiscal deficits. In this paper, the authors investigate the extent to which this phenomenon has occurred. They estimate panel data regressions using the Boston ...
Report
How Do Voters Respond to Welfare vis-à-vis Public Good Programs? An Empirical Test for Clientelism
This paper examines allocation of benefits under local government programs in West Bengal, India to isolate patterns consistent with political clientelism. Using household survey data, we find that voters respond positively to private welfare benefits but not to local public good programs, while reporting having benefited from both. Consistent with the voting patterns, shocks to electoral competition induced by exogenous redistricting of villages resulted in upper-tier governments manipulating allocations across local governments only for welfare programs. Through the lens of a hierarchical ...
Working Paper
Are Friends of Schools the Enemies of Equity? The Interplay of School Funding Policies and External Fundraising
School districts across the US have adopted funding policies designed to distribute resources more equitably across schools. Concurrently, schools are increasing external fundraising efforts to supplement district budget allocations. We document both funding policies and fundraising efforts in Chicago Public Schools. We find that adoption of a weighted-student funding policy reallocated more dollars to schools with high shares of students eligible for free/reduced-price lunch, creating a policy-induced per-pupil expenditure gap. Further, almost all schools raised external funds over the study ...
Report
A New Look at Racial Disparities Using a More Comprehensive Wealth Measure
Most research measuring disparities in wealth by race relies on data that exclude resources that are disproportionately important to low-wealth and non-white families, namely defined benefit (DB) pensions and Social Security. This paper finds that once these resources are included, disparities in wealth between white families and Black and Hispanic families are substantially smaller and that they are not rising over time. The powerful equalizing roles of DB pensions and Social Security highlighted here are further motivation for maintaining their fiscal health. This paper also presents ...
Working Paper
I've Got 99 Problems But a Bill Ain't One: Hospital Billing Caps and Financial Distress in California
We examine the financial consequences of the 2007 California Fair Pricing Law (FPL), a law that places a price ceiling on hospital bills for uninsured and financially vulnerable individuals. Using difference-in difference-in-differences models, we exploit cross-sectional variation in exposure to the law to estimate the causal effects of the FPL on different measures of financial distress. We find that the law reduces the medical and non-medical debt burden of individuals targeted by the law, with the likelihood of incurring non-medical debt in collections declining by 14.5 percent and the ...
Discussion Paper
Developing Inclusive Communities: Challenges and Opportunities for Mixed-Income Housing
Over the past decade, housing costs have risen faster than incomes. The need for affordable rental housing has well outpaced the number of available units as well as funding allocations at the federal level. Local regulation and land use policies that increase the cost of subsidized, mixed-income housing construction and preservation have contributed to the affordability problem.To meet the affordable housing needs in U.S. communities, innovation, creativity, and "out of the box" thinking may be required, particularly as it relates to reducing the rapidly increasing costs of development. ...
Report
The Effect of Constitutional Provisions on Education Policy and Outcomes
Education services in the United States are determined predominantly by non-market institutions, the rules of which are defined by state constitutions. This paper empirically examines the effect of changes in constitutional provisions on education outcomes in the United States. To show causal effects, we exploit discontinuities in the procedure for adopting constitutional amendments to compare outcomes when an amendment passed with those when an amendment failed. Our results show that adoption of an amendment results in higher per-pupil expenditure, higher teacher salaries, smaller class ...
Report
Clientelistic Politics and Pro-Poor Targeting: Rules versus Discretionary Budgets
Past research has provided evidence of clientelistic politics in delivery of program benefits by local governments (gram panchayats (GPs)), and manipulation of GP program budgets by legislators and elected officials at upper tiers in West Bengal, India. Using household panel survey data spanning 1998-2008, we examine the consequences of clientelism for distributive equity. We find that targeting of anti-poverty programs was progressive both within and across GPs, and is explained by greater 'vote responsiveness' of poor households to receipt of welfare benefits. Across-GP allocations were ...
Working Paper
State disinvestment in higher education: the impact on public research universities' patent applications
While state appropriations are the largest revenue source of the U.S. public university systems, they have declined significantly over the past several decades. Surprisingly, there is little empirical work on the effect of state appropriation cuts on the research productivity of public universities. Helping fill that gap, this paper is the first to examine the role that state appropriations play in public universities? patent production. The results suggest that state appropriation cuts have a negative impact on the number of approved patent applications from public research universities. ...
Working Paper
Estimating the Cost Function of Connecticut Public K–12 Education: Implications for Inequity and Inadequacy in School Spending
Facing legal challenges and public pressures, Connecticut needs an objective and rigorous study of its public education costs. This study is the first to estimate the cost function of Connecticut public K–12 education and to evaluate the equity and the adequacy in the state’s school spending based on regression-estimated education costs. It finds large disparities across districts in education costs and cost-adjusted spending. Districts with the largest enrollments, the highestschool-age-child-poverty rates, or the least amount of property wealth, on average, have the highest costs and ...