Litigation, School Finance Reform, and Aggregate Educational Spending

In the past two decades, litigation in many U.S. states has triggered educational reform movements designed to reduce the inequalities in educational expenditures across school districts. This paper uses a panel data set across all the states from 1970-1990 to examine the role of litigation and educational finance reform in determining the level of education funding in a flexible, dynamic setting. An important finding of our work is that litigation and reform have differential effects across the states, in some cases leading to increases while in other cases decreases in predicted spending