Education finance reform and investment in human capital: lessons from California
研究加州1970年代教育融资从混合地方与州融资转向纯州融资后，公共教育资金下降10-15%的原因，发现政治经济模型可解释大部分下降，且支出更平等主要源于富裕社区减少而非贫困社区增加。
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 foundation system of mixed local and state financing to one of effectively pure state finance and subsequently saw its funding of public education fall between 10 and 15% 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 calibrated 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 10%.