Many studies have documented the pervasive underfunding of public sector pension plans in the United States in recent years. The deterioration of the funded status of public pension plans coincided with severe fiscal crises that state and local governments experienced in the 2000s. This...

This paper investigates the impact of immigration on the college enrollment of U.S. natives. Many studies have focused on the effect of increased demand for schooling by immigrants on the enrollment of natives. However, changes in immigrant labor supply may also affect native enrollment by...

While state appropriations are the largest revenue source of the U.S. public university systems, they have declined significantly over the past several decades. Surprisingly, there is little empirical work on the effect of state appropriation cuts on the research productivity of public...

This paper's study of Connecticut's education costs can serve as the foundation of an equitable and adequate state education aid formula. To the best of the author's knowledge, it is the first cost function study of Connecticut public K-12 education. The author uses a regression model to...

Aimed at increasing the adoption rate of older children, Minnesota's 2015 Northstar Care Program eliminated the adoption penalty (the decrease in fostering-based financial transfers associated with adoption) for children aged six and older, while maintaining it for children under age six. Using...

After being sued for inequity and inadequacy in school funding, many states have reformed their education aid policies. Using Connecticut as an example, this paper shows how to design a state education aid formula that can effectively address funding inequity and inadequacy while taking...

Equal educational opportunity is a core American value. Yet many children of low-income or minority racial or ethnic status attend public schools that are lower quality compared with those that white children or high-income children attend. And data indicate that, on average, low-income or...

Effectiveness of public spending still remains relatively an elusive empirical issue. This preliminary analysis is an attempt on the topic, using benefit incidence methodology, at the subnational government level in health sector of India. The results revealed public health system is `seemingly'...

Recent research links the inequality across countries and regions to colonial institutions. This paper argues that trade shocks could alter the development path of a country or subnational units, in spite of its colonial institutions. This hypothesis is analyzed using state-level data for...

This paper studies the impact of the health decentralization of funds and responsibilities that took place in Mexico in 1997 on state level health outcomes. It renders two main results. First, the magnitude of transfers from the federal government to states failed to take into account...