School districts have more influence on home buyers’ choices than any other local-government unit, yet hardly anyone knows why they exist. “Making the Grade” explains the development of American school districts and advances an economic argument for their continued existence. In the...

I outline the twentieth-century history of American zoning to explain how homeowners came to dominate its content and administration in most jurisdictions. Zoning's original purpose was to protect homeowners in residential areas from devaluation by industrial and apartment uses that had been...

Miller v. Schoene, 276 U.S. 272 (1928), approved the uncompensated destruction of cedar trees that were alternate hosts to a fungus that damaged apple orchards but not cedars. Justice Stone's opinion implied that deciding for either cedar or apple growers would amount to action by the state,...

This article offers an explanation for the failure of statewide voucher plans, which would entitle students to use public money to attend private schools, to be generally accepted by the public. I submit that public schools are in fact a local public good. The reason economists have failed to...

Argues that the California Supreme Court's landmark decision, Serrano v. Priest, crippled the Tiebout system by divorcing local property wealth from school spending.

Questions the rationale behind judicial review of school finance schemes adopted by legislatures that are influenced by "property-rich" communities, and examines voter preference in the failed 1992 gubernatorial campaign of a New Hampshire legislator who ran on a property tax and school reform...

Tiebout’s "vote with your feet" model dispensed with political behavior in local government. The present article offers a political model borrowed from corporate finance. Local governments are viewed as municipal corporations whose shareholders are homeowners and whose collective property...