Research Database

This paper examines the effect of different education financing systems on the level and distribution of resources devoted to public education. We focus on California, which in the 1970's was transformed from a system of mixed local and state financing to one of effectively pure state finance and subsequently saw its funding of public education fall between ten and fifteen percent relative to the rest of the US. We show that a simple political economy model of public finance can account for the bulk of this drop. We find that while the distribution of spending became more equal, this was mainly at the cost of a large reduction in spending in the wealthier communities with little increase for the poorer districts. Our model implies that there is no simple trade-off between equity and resources; we show that if California had moved to the opposite extreme and abolished state aid altogether, funding for public education would also have dropped by almost ten percent.

A pairwise random meeting model with money is used to study the nominal yield on pure-discount, default-free securities that are issued by the government. There is one steady state with matured securities at par and, for some parameters, another with them at a discount. In the former, exogenous rejection of unmatured securities by the government is necessary and sufficient for such a steady state to display a positive nominal yield on unmatured securities. In the latter, the post-maturity discount on securities induces a deeper pre-maturity discount even if there is no exogenous rejection of unmatured securities.