A central challenge in estimating models with heterogeneous housing is separating quality from price. We provide a new method for estimating hedonic functions for rental rates and housing values treating housing quality as unobserved by the econo- metrician. Our method also deals with the...

This paper examines the impact of a gifted program on retention in an urban school district using a regression discontinuity design. Gifted programs often employ IQ thresholds for admission, with those above the threshold being admitted. One common problem with the RD design arises if the...

We develop a general equilibrium model of the market for undergraduate higher education that captures the coexistence of public and private colleges, the large degree of quality differentiation among them, and the tuition and admission policies that emerge from their competition for students....

We study the effectiveness of magnet programs in an urban district that ration excess demand by admission lotteries. Differential attrition arises since students who lose the lottery are more likely to pursue options outside the school district than students who win the lottery. When students...

This paper examines whether gifted programs can help urban districts retain students. Gifted programs often IQ thresholds for admission, which creates strong incentives to manipulate the IQ score of students to increase access to the program. In the presence of local manipulation, the standard...

We study the intergenerational conflict over the provision of public education. This conflict arises because older households without children have weaker incentives to support the provision of high quality educational services in a community than younger households with school-age children. We...

There exists significant dispersion in output prices between firms in many industries. As a consequence the value of output is not necessarily a good measure of the quantity of output. Estimation of production functions for these types of goods is thus challenging if quantities and prices of...

Few empirical strategies have been developed that investigate public provision under majority rule while taking explicit account of the constraints implied by mobility of households. The goal of this paper is to improve our understanding of voting in local communities when neighborhood quality...

Research over the past several years has led to development of models characterizing equilibrium in a system of local jurisdictions. More recently, there have been a number of studies which have tried to estimate these models. The evidence suggests that simple parametric models can explain the...