Suburbanization, demographic change and the consequences for school finance
David Figlio and
Deborah Fletcher
Journal of Public Economics, 2012, vol. 96, issue 11, 1144-1153
Abstract:
The existing literature on the relationship between the share of elderly in a community and the support for local public education has led to mixed results to date. One potential reason behind this is that the share of elderly in a community is endogenous, and it is very difficult to disentangle the effects of individuals aging in place from that of dynamic Tiebout sorting. The point of this paper is to carefully document the degree to which aging in place has occurred in the American suburbs, and to estimate the degree to which it has influenced school finance once the initial settlers of these suburbs were no longer the parents of school-aged children. We hand-match data from the 1950 and 1960 Censuses of Population and Housing to more recent data to link postwar suburban development to later school finance. Using a novel method for identifying the causal effects of aging in place, we find that the percentage of elderly adults in a school district is negatively related to the level of support for public schooling, and that this is particularly true for school districts in metropolitan areas where the school-aged population is more heavily nonwhite relative to the elderly population.
Keywords: School finance; Aging; Tiebout sorting; Demographic change; Suburbanization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272711001344
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
Chapter: Suburbanization, Demographic Change and the Consequences for School Finance (2010)
Working Paper: Suburbanization, Demographic Change and the Consequences for School Finance (2010) 
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:eee:pubeco:v:96:y:2012:i:11:p:1144-1153
DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2011.07.007
Access Statistics for this article
Journal of Public Economics is currently edited by R. Boadway and J. Poterba
More articles in Journal of Public Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().