Education Finance Reform and Investment in Human Capital: Lessons from California / Raquel Fernandez, Richard Rogerson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fernandez, Raquel.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Rogerson, Richard.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w5369.

NBER working paper series no. w5369

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Education Finance Reform and Investment in Human Capital

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 1995.

Summary:

This paper examines the effect of different education financing systems on the level and distribution of resources devoted to public education. We focus on California, which in the 1970's moved from a system of mixed local and state financing to one of effectively pure state finance and subsequently saw its funding of public education fall between ten and fifteen percent relative to the rest of the US. We show that a simple political economy model of public finance can account for the bulk of this drop. We find that while the distribution of spending became more equal, this was mainly at the cost of a large reduction in spending in the wealthier communities with little increase for the poorer districts. Our model implies that there is no simple trade-off between equity and resources; we show that if California had moved to the opposite extreme and abolished state aid altogether, funding for public education would also have dropped by almost ten percent.

Notes:

Print version record

November 1995.