The Political Economy of School Finance Systems With Endogenous State and Local Tax Policies

Stephen Calabrese, Dennis Epple and Richard Romano

International Economic Review, 2025, vol. 66, issue 3, 1363-1389

Abstract: Beginning in the 1970s, many state courts declared the widespread inequality in education spending across schools a violation of their state's constitution. Funding systems then emerged providing differing approaches to state and local support of education. We develop a theoretical framework and characterize outcomes under alternative systems. Our framework has voting over policies in both state and local elections. A counterpart computational model compares equilibrium outcomes under the alternative school finance systems and examines across state differences in expenditures. The model predicts that voters prefer systems with mixed state and local finance with designs mirroring those observed in practice.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/iere.12762

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:wly:iecrev:v:66:y:2025:i:3:p:1363-1389

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0020-6598

Access Statistics for this article

International Economic Review is currently edited by Michael O'Riordan and Dirk Krueger

More articles in International Economic Review from Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association 160 McNeil Building, 3718 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6297. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().