Abstract Over 60 years ago, Charles Tiebout hypothesized that decentralized provision of public s... more Abstract Over 60 years ago, Charles Tiebout hypothesized that decentralized provision of public services (such as public schools) through local governments can result in efficient levels of such services (Tiebout, 1956). His key insight was that residential mobility of households might provide a sufficient disciplining force (analogous to typical market forces) to insure efficient provision of local public services. With sufficient local competition, there would be no room for local governments to engage in excessive political rent seeking, and enough variety in local tax and service packages would emerge to satisfy different consumer tastes. In the case of public education, however, serious issues related to equity and equal opportunity also emerge, suggesting a tradeoff between the promise of Tiebout efficiency and the emergence of inequities in educational opportunities for children of different income classes and different races.
Empirical attempts to link teenage out-of-wedlock births to the incentive structure of Aid to Fam... more Empirical attempts to link teenage out-of-wedlock births to the incentive structure of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) have met with mixed results. This has suggested to many researchers that, while the AFDC program contains incentives for poor women to have children out-ofwedlock, these incentives cannot be the primary culprit responsible for current levels of out-of-wedlock births. This paper presents a model that is consistent with the stylized facts and the empirical evidence but establishes a mechanism through which AFDC could in fact be the primary reason for observed levels of illegitimacy. The model is standard with one exception: How much utility individuals are able to obtain from having a child depends on the level of "social approval" that is associated with having out-of-wedlock children. This social approval is a function of the fraction of individuals in all previous generations who chose to have children out-of-wedlock, where the effect of each generation diminishes with time. While the model is successful in replicating the stylized facts on AFDC and illegitimacy and establishes a link between the two through a government induced change in "values," it also demonstrates that welfare reform aimed at reducing the incentives for poor women to have out-of-wedlock births may not be as effective as policy makers who believe in a causal link between AFDC and illegitimacy might suspect.
Is it more efficient to rent a car or take taxis while on vacation? How do coupons change demand?... more Is it more efficient to rent a car or take taxis while on vacation? How do coupons change demand? MICROECONOMICS: AN INTUITIVE APPROACH explains the economic theory underlying everyday choices in a fun and conversational way. While showing the big picture of economic intuition, this easy-to-read text also aids conceptual thinking with careful analysis. Each copy includes access to online LiveGraphs -- a suite of interactive, animated graphs that allows you to view dimensional graphs and functions illustrated in the book, as well as some additional graphs that are not in the printed text. LiveGraphs and the Study Guide are accessible through the access code that is included with the purchase of a new text.
Is it more efficient to rent a car or take taxis while on vacation? How do coupons change demand?... more Is it more efficient to rent a car or take taxis while on vacation? How do coupons change demand? MICROECONOMICS: AN INTUITIVE APPROACH WITH CALCULUS explains the economic theory underlying day-to-day choices. The A sections of each chapter introduce concepts using intuition, a conversational writing style, everyday examples, and graphs. The B sections cover the same concepts with accessible mathematical analyses. Each copy includes access to online LiveGraphs -- a suite of interactive, animated graphs that allows you to view dimensional graphs and functions illustrated in the book, as well as some additional graphs that are not in the printed text.LiveGraphs and the Study Guide are accessible through the access code that is included with the purchase of a new text.
Is it more efficient to rent a car or take taxis while on vacation? How do coupons change demand?... more Is it more efficient to rent a car or take taxis while on vacation? How do coupons change demand? MICROECONOMICS: AN INTUITIVE APPROACH WITH CALCULUS explains the economic theory underlying day-to-day choices. The A sections of each chapter introduce concepts using intuition, a conversational writing style, everyday examples, and graphs. The B sections cover the same concepts with accessible mathematical analyses. Each copy includes access to online LiveGraphs -- a suite of interactive, animated graphs that allows you to view dimensional graphs and functions illustrated in the book, as well as some additional graphs that are not in the printed text.LiveGraphs and the Study Guide are accessible through the access code that is included with the purchase of a new text.
The views expressed are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect official p... more The views expressed are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect official positions of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the Federal Reserve System, or the Board of Governors.
The international literature as we have reviewed it suggests that, while genetics provides an imp... more The international literature as we have reviewed it suggests that, while genetics provides an important causal link from parents to child outcomes, the environment a child is raised in represents an equally important link. However, our conception of the environment that is relevant for this process has grown from an early focus on home environments to our present focus on broader environments such as neighborhoods, schools and broadly defined “community groups. ” While there is evidence that shared home environments do matter for outcomes measured early in life, the same evidence tends to suggest that such environments become less important as causal explanations for outcomes in adolescence and adulthood. Furthermore, even for outcome measures early in life, certain candidates for home environment factors are increasingly being ruled out as causal factors in explaining differences in many outcomes, factors like family income, differences in parenting styles and certain aspects of fa...
While the issue of school finance has been studied extensively, relatively little effort has been... more While the issue of school finance has been studied extensively, relatively little effort has been devoted to understanding how school finance policies impact the nature of communities. This is peculiar in light of substantial evidence that public school quality at least in the U.S. has much to do with residential choices by households, and in light of increasing empirical evidence that residential segregation perpetuates income inequality. In a development context where rapid urbanization is only now taking place and cities are still taking shape, these U.S. findings might have important policy implications. Whatever housing patterns emerge during the development of urbanized communities are likely to retain their character for long periods of time. School finance policies during the process of development may therefore have even larger impacts on these communities than they do in developed settings. In this paper, I emphasize in particular the importance of considering not only the...
This document has been reproduced as received from the person or organization originating it. Min... more This document has been reproduced as received from the person or organization originating it. Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality.
Administrative datasets frequently lack information on the protocol used to assign subjects to tr... more Administrative datasets frequently lack information on the protocol used to assign subjects to treatment conditions. In this paper, we show that under certain conditions, consistent causal estimates can be recovered from data where the actual assignment protocol is uncertain, but the probability of random assignment is known. Predictably, estimators are less consistent when the probability of random assignment is unknown and must itself be inferred. We introduce a method of inferring the probability of random assignment ex post based on a scalar measure of the degree of balance in observed characteristics across treatment conditions. We then apply this method to the study of peer effects in education production. Results indicate that a considerable portion of OLS peer effects estimates reflect selection – intuitively, the results tend to be stronger in schools that depart obviously from random assignment. One relatively robust result, however, is that average achievement is higher i...
The descriptive statistics of the Maori population (Ministry of Maori Development 1998; Ongley, C... more The descriptive statistics of the Maori population (Ministry of Maori Development 1998; Ongley, Carson et al. 1998) may lend themselves to similar analysis. However, as we make clear later, we find no credible evidence for the hypothesis that inter-race differences in cognitive ability are genetic in nature, either for the US or New Zealand. 9 Within the New Zealand context, of course, the term "family" has quite a different meaning for traditional Maori than it does in Pakeha settings (Kamerman and Fahn 1997; Smith 1998), and traditional Maori are more likely to emphasize the role of extended family and less likely to think of parents as the crucial decision maker in a child's life. At the same time, in the past four decades Maori in New Zealand have increasingly urbanized and become disconnected from traditional extended family relationships. Our sense, therefore, is that for many Maori families, parents are indeed increasingly active decision makers on behalf of their children. In any case, the focus in our conceptual framework on the parents as the crucial but constrained decision maker does not exclude the possibility of parents in certain cultural settings making many of these decisions with the extended family or other traditional institutions such as hapu and iwi. As we point out below, such choices could be represented by the arrow labeled "community choice."
Abstract Over 60 years ago, Charles Tiebout hypothesized that decentralized provision of public s... more Abstract Over 60 years ago, Charles Tiebout hypothesized that decentralized provision of public services (such as public schools) through local governments can result in efficient levels of such services (Tiebout, 1956). His key insight was that residential mobility of households might provide a sufficient disciplining force (analogous to typical market forces) to insure efficient provision of local public services. With sufficient local competition, there would be no room for local governments to engage in excessive political rent seeking, and enough variety in local tax and service packages would emerge to satisfy different consumer tastes. In the case of public education, however, serious issues related to equity and equal opportunity also emerge, suggesting a tradeoff between the promise of Tiebout efficiency and the emergence of inequities in educational opportunities for children of different income classes and different races.
Empirical attempts to link teenage out-of-wedlock births to the incentive structure of Aid to Fam... more Empirical attempts to link teenage out-of-wedlock births to the incentive structure of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) have met with mixed results. This has suggested to many researchers that, while the AFDC program contains incentives for poor women to have children out-ofwedlock, these incentives cannot be the primary culprit responsible for current levels of out-of-wedlock births. This paper presents a model that is consistent with the stylized facts and the empirical evidence but establishes a mechanism through which AFDC could in fact be the primary reason for observed levels of illegitimacy. The model is standard with one exception: How much utility individuals are able to obtain from having a child depends on the level of "social approval" that is associated with having out-of-wedlock children. This social approval is a function of the fraction of individuals in all previous generations who chose to have children out-of-wedlock, where the effect of each generation diminishes with time. While the model is successful in replicating the stylized facts on AFDC and illegitimacy and establishes a link between the two through a government induced change in "values," it also demonstrates that welfare reform aimed at reducing the incentives for poor women to have out-of-wedlock births may not be as effective as policy makers who believe in a causal link between AFDC and illegitimacy might suspect.
Is it more efficient to rent a car or take taxis while on vacation? How do coupons change demand?... more Is it more efficient to rent a car or take taxis while on vacation? How do coupons change demand? MICROECONOMICS: AN INTUITIVE APPROACH explains the economic theory underlying everyday choices in a fun and conversational way. While showing the big picture of economic intuition, this easy-to-read text also aids conceptual thinking with careful analysis. Each copy includes access to online LiveGraphs -- a suite of interactive, animated graphs that allows you to view dimensional graphs and functions illustrated in the book, as well as some additional graphs that are not in the printed text. LiveGraphs and the Study Guide are accessible through the access code that is included with the purchase of a new text.
Is it more efficient to rent a car or take taxis while on vacation? How do coupons change demand?... more Is it more efficient to rent a car or take taxis while on vacation? How do coupons change demand? MICROECONOMICS: AN INTUITIVE APPROACH WITH CALCULUS explains the economic theory underlying day-to-day choices. The A sections of each chapter introduce concepts using intuition, a conversational writing style, everyday examples, and graphs. The B sections cover the same concepts with accessible mathematical analyses. Each copy includes access to online LiveGraphs -- a suite of interactive, animated graphs that allows you to view dimensional graphs and functions illustrated in the book, as well as some additional graphs that are not in the printed text.LiveGraphs and the Study Guide are accessible through the access code that is included with the purchase of a new text.
Is it more efficient to rent a car or take taxis while on vacation? How do coupons change demand?... more Is it more efficient to rent a car or take taxis while on vacation? How do coupons change demand? MICROECONOMICS: AN INTUITIVE APPROACH WITH CALCULUS explains the economic theory underlying day-to-day choices. The A sections of each chapter introduce concepts using intuition, a conversational writing style, everyday examples, and graphs. The B sections cover the same concepts with accessible mathematical analyses. Each copy includes access to online LiveGraphs -- a suite of interactive, animated graphs that allows you to view dimensional graphs and functions illustrated in the book, as well as some additional graphs that are not in the printed text.LiveGraphs and the Study Guide are accessible through the access code that is included with the purchase of a new text.
The views expressed are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect official p... more The views expressed are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect official positions of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the Federal Reserve System, or the Board of Governors.
The international literature as we have reviewed it suggests that, while genetics provides an imp... more The international literature as we have reviewed it suggests that, while genetics provides an important causal link from parents to child outcomes, the environment a child is raised in represents an equally important link. However, our conception of the environment that is relevant for this process has grown from an early focus on home environments to our present focus on broader environments such as neighborhoods, schools and broadly defined “community groups. ” While there is evidence that shared home environments do matter for outcomes measured early in life, the same evidence tends to suggest that such environments become less important as causal explanations for outcomes in adolescence and adulthood. Furthermore, even for outcome measures early in life, certain candidates for home environment factors are increasingly being ruled out as causal factors in explaining differences in many outcomes, factors like family income, differences in parenting styles and certain aspects of fa...
While the issue of school finance has been studied extensively, relatively little effort has been... more While the issue of school finance has been studied extensively, relatively little effort has been devoted to understanding how school finance policies impact the nature of communities. This is peculiar in light of substantial evidence that public school quality at least in the U.S. has much to do with residential choices by households, and in light of increasing empirical evidence that residential segregation perpetuates income inequality. In a development context where rapid urbanization is only now taking place and cities are still taking shape, these U.S. findings might have important policy implications. Whatever housing patterns emerge during the development of urbanized communities are likely to retain their character for long periods of time. School finance policies during the process of development may therefore have even larger impacts on these communities than they do in developed settings. In this paper, I emphasize in particular the importance of considering not only the...
This document has been reproduced as received from the person or organization originating it. Min... more This document has been reproduced as received from the person or organization originating it. Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality.
Administrative datasets frequently lack information on the protocol used to assign subjects to tr... more Administrative datasets frequently lack information on the protocol used to assign subjects to treatment conditions. In this paper, we show that under certain conditions, consistent causal estimates can be recovered from data where the actual assignment protocol is uncertain, but the probability of random assignment is known. Predictably, estimators are less consistent when the probability of random assignment is unknown and must itself be inferred. We introduce a method of inferring the probability of random assignment ex post based on a scalar measure of the degree of balance in observed characteristics across treatment conditions. We then apply this method to the study of peer effects in education production. Results indicate that a considerable portion of OLS peer effects estimates reflect selection – intuitively, the results tend to be stronger in schools that depart obviously from random assignment. One relatively robust result, however, is that average achievement is higher i...
The descriptive statistics of the Maori population (Ministry of Maori Development 1998; Ongley, C... more The descriptive statistics of the Maori population (Ministry of Maori Development 1998; Ongley, Carson et al. 1998) may lend themselves to similar analysis. However, as we make clear later, we find no credible evidence for the hypothesis that inter-race differences in cognitive ability are genetic in nature, either for the US or New Zealand. 9 Within the New Zealand context, of course, the term "family" has quite a different meaning for traditional Maori than it does in Pakeha settings (Kamerman and Fahn 1997; Smith 1998), and traditional Maori are more likely to emphasize the role of extended family and less likely to think of parents as the crucial decision maker in a child's life. At the same time, in the past four decades Maori in New Zealand have increasingly urbanized and become disconnected from traditional extended family relationships. Our sense, therefore, is that for many Maori families, parents are indeed increasingly active decision makers on behalf of their children. In any case, the focus in our conceptual framework on the parents as the crucial but constrained decision maker does not exclude the possibility of parents in certain cultural settings making many of these decisions with the extended family or other traditional institutions such as hapu and iwi. As we point out below, such choices could be represented by the arrow labeled "community choice."
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