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Journal Article
The Great Recession’s impact on school district finances in New York State
A slowly emerging literature explores the effects of the Great Recession on different parts of the economy; however, very little research examines the impact of the Great Recession (or any other recession) on schools. Given the fundamental role of education in human capital formation and growth, understanding the effect of recessions on schools is essential. This article contributes to filling this gap. Exploiting detailed panel data on a multitude of school finance indicators and a trend shift analysis, it examines how the Great Recession affected school finances in New York State. While it ...
Journal Article
A tale of two states: the recession’s impact on N.Y. and N.J. school finances
Although schools play a crucial role in human capital formation and economic growth, relatively few studies consider the effect of recessions (and in particular the Great Recession) on schools. This article helps fill this gap by comparing and contrasting the effects of the Great Recession on school districts in New York and New Jersey. In fact, it is the first article to compare the impacts of the Great Recession on schools in different states. The authors find that the two states had very different experiences in the two years following the recession. While total school funding in New York ...
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Abbott and Bacon Districts: education finances during the Great Recession
In the State of New Jersey, any child between the age of five and eighteen has the constitutional right to a thorough and efficient education. The State of New Jersey also has one of the country?s most rigid policies regarding a balanced budget come fiscal end. When state and local revenues took a big hit in the most recent recession, officials had to make tough decisions about education spending. This paper exploits rich panel data and trend-shift analysis to analyze how school finances in the Abbott and Bacon School Districts, as well as the high-poverty districts in general, were affected ...
Journal Article
Tough Choices: New Jersey Schools during the Great Recession and Beyond
This study examines the medium-term effects of the Great Recession on school finances in New Jersey using detailed school district panel data and an interrupted time series analysis. The authors find that the recession led to sharp cuts in school funding and expenditure, in spite of the federal stimulus. These cuts deepened as the stimulus abated. An analysis of variations by metropolitan area reveals that the Camden metro area, the highest poverty area reviewed, experienced considerably larger cuts in expenditures when the stimulus receded compared with other areas. The findings are ...
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Precarious slopes? The Great Recession, federal stimulus, and New Jersey schools
While sparse literature exists investigating the impact of the Great Recession on various sectors of the economy, there is virtually no research that studies the effect of the Great Recession, or past recessions, on schools. This paper starts to fill the void. Studying school funding during the recession is of paramount importance because schools have a fundamental role in fostering human capital formation and economic growth. We exploit unique panel-data and trend-shift analysis to analyze how New Jersey school finances were affected during the Great Recession and the ARRA federal stimulus ...
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Still not out of the woods? New Jersey schools during the recession and beyond
Schools are essential in forming human capital and in improving the long-term health of the economy. They are also heavily reliant on state and local funds, which were severely depleted during the Great Recession. To alleviate some of the strain on local budgets, the federal government passed and implemented a large stimulus package, which included funds for school districts. However, the stimulus funds were drawn down beginning in 2011, at a time when state and local revenues were still under pressure. In this paper, we use a detailed panel data set of all school districts in New Jersey for ...
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The long road to recovery: New York Schools in the aftermath of the Great Recession
Schools play a crucial role in human capital development, and were one of the many elements of government adversely affected by the Great Recession. Using a rich panel data set of New York State school districts and a trend-shift analysis, we examine how the funding and expenditure dynamics of districts have changed in the four years since the recession hit. We find that although the stimulus prevented major cuts to expenditures while it was in place, once the stimulus funding was used up districts faced strong budget constraints and made deep cuts to their expenditures. While state and local ...
Journal Article
The Long Road to Recovery: New York Schools in the Aftermath of the Great Recession
Using rich panel data and an interrupted time-series analysis, the authors examine how the funding and expenditure dynamics of New York school districts changed in the four years after the Great Recession. Extending prior work on the immediate effects of the recession on school finances in 2009-10 in Chakrabarti, Livingston, and Setren (2015), they take a longer-term view through 2012, to document what happened when support from federal stimulus funding began to dwindle and then ended. The analysis finds that the more than $6 billion in support from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act ...
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The impact of the Great Recession on school district finances: evidence from New York
Despite education?s fundamental role in human capital formation and growth, there is no research that examines the effect of the Great Recession (or any other recession) on schools. Our paper begins to fill this gap. Exploiting detailed data on school finance indicators and an analysis of trend shifts, we examine how the Great Recession affected school funding in New York State. While we find no evidence of effects on either total revenue or expenditure, there were important compositional changes to both. There is strong evidence of substitution of funds on the revenue side?the infusion of ...