We study the effects of increased school spending in rural American school districts by leveraging the introduction and subsequent expansion of Wisconsin's Sparsity Aid Program. We find that the program, which provides additional state funding to small and isolated school districts, increased...

In recent years, a wave of new studies on the effects of educational interventions on student performance has emerged. The realization that inputs in the education process are endogenous is important for the validity of traditional findings. Because of ignoring endogeneity bias, all traditional...

Global trends of fertility decline, population aging, and rural outmigration are creating pressures to consolidate school systems, with the rationale that economies of scale will enable higher quality education to be delivered in an efficient manner, despite longer travel distances for students....