Economic theory predicts that unconditional intergovernmental grant income and private income are perfectly fungible. Despite this prediction, the literature on fiscal federalism documents that grant and private income are empirically non-equivalent. A large scale school finance reform in New...

This paper explores two aspects of the connection between property tax revenues and house prices. First, I estimate the elasticity of property tax revenues with respect to house prices. This elasticity does not necessarily equal one as governments may adjust effective tax rates to offset changes...

In the early 1990s, nearly forty years after Brown v. the Board of Education, three Supreme Court decisions dramatically altered the legal environment for court-ordered desegregation. Lower courts have released numerous school districts from their desegregation plans as a result. Over the same...

Wage inequality has risen dramatically in the United States since at least 1980. This paper quantifies the role that the tax policies of the federal and state governments have played in mitigating wage inequality. The analysis, which isolates the contribution of federal taxes and state taxes...

This paper describes a feedback effect between real and financial development. The paper presents a new variable, which we call the cost of financial intermediation, through which the feedback between finance and growth operates. The theoretical part of the paper describes how specialization of...

This paper estimates a structural demand model for commercial bank deposit services. Following the discrete choice literature, consumer decisions are based on prices and bank characteristics. The results, based on the U.S. for 1993-1999, indicate that, with respect to prices, consumers respond...

This paper introduces new estimates of recent productivity developments in the United States, using an appropriate theoretical framework for aggregating industry MFP to sectors and the total economy. Our work sheds light on the sources of the continued strong performance of U.S. productivity...

How much of aggregate employment fluctuations is due to plants destroying and then recreating the same jobs over the cycle and how much is due to some plants permanently destroying jobs in a recession and other plants permanently creating jobs in an expansion? This paper decomposes plant level...