Can We Save the American Dream? A Dynamic General Equilibrium Analysis of the Effects of School Financing on Local Opportunities

Fabian Eckert and Tatjana Kleineberg
Additional contact information
Tatjana Kleineberg: Yale

No 1197, 2019 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: Neighborhoods in the US differ substantially in the educational and economic opportunities that they offer to children who grow up in them. We develop and estimate a structural spatial equilibrium model of residential and education choice to study the effects of school financing policies on education outcomes, intergenerational mobility, and welfare at the local and aggregate level. Our model generates persistent effects of children's neighborhoods on adult outcomes through local labor market access and local human capital formation. Local school funding is an important component of the latter. Schools are funded through income taxation and local rent taxation. We estimate the model using a range of US Census datasets by fitting model predictions to regional data of the actual US geography. We use the estimated model to study the effects of counterfactual policy interventions, in particular, the equalization of school funding across all students and the use of rent subsidies. We find that general equilibrium responses in local prices and local skill compositions significantly dampen the partial equilibrium effects of the policy, so that effects on education outcomes and intergenerational mobility are positive but only moderate in general equilibrium.

Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

Downloads: (external link)
https://red-files-public.s3.amazonaws.com/meetpapers/2019/paper_1197.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:red:sed019:1197

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2019 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().