 Inequality and school funding in the rural United States, 1890Explorations in Economic History, 2013, vol. 50, issue 2, 267-284 Abstract: This paper examines the relationship of inequality to school funding in counties of the U.S. in 1890. Inequality, measured here on the basis of farm-size distributions, is found to be negatively related to local school property tax revenues across the whole sample of 1345 rural counties. However, further analysis shows that this relationship is not consistent across the sample. In the North, there is a significant negative relationship between inequality and school funding, and this relationship is shown to be consistent with the fact that assessed values of property did not rise linearly with wealth. Across the South, there is no distinct relationship between inequality and school funding. The results also indicate that inequality in the South cannot directly explain the gap in school funding with the North, in the sense that redistributing farms in the South to match the Northern distributions leads to no predicted increase in school funding. Keywords: Land distribution; Inequality; School finance; Property taxes (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:exehis:v:50:y:2013:i:2:p:267-284 DOI: 10.1016/j.eeh.2012.11.003 Access Statistics for this article Explorations in Economic History is currently edited by R.H. Steckel More articles in Explorations in Economic History from Elsevier |
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