Federalism and Public Education: The Role of Household Choices, Information and Competition

这项研究的目的是调查教育政策在联邦系统中的影响。它利用已经开发和成功的州和地方公共财政的理论模型来推导出一个可计算的模型，该模型根据数据进行校准，并扩展到特别适用于教育。这种模式的优点是，它允许在不同学区之间进行不完善的收入分层，使用各种类型的税收工具，并在州和地方政府之间纳入许多不同类型的财政。因此，它可以根据美国通常观察到的那种数据进行校准。然后对该模型进行修改，使其特别适用于公共教育。该模型不是关注教育生产过程中的任何一种投入，而是试图追踪家长和学校官员的个人行为对国家公共教育政策变化带来的激励变化的影响。特别是，这项研究侧重于国家政策对学校质量的影响，它将学校质量定义为一个过程的结果，在这个过程中，除了每个学生的支出外，同伴质量、家长特征、教师和家长的努力以及对当地信息的有效利用等因素发挥着重要作用。鉴于家庭住所和公立学校之间的联系，国家政策影响父母移民选择的潜力尤其突出。这一点，再加上家长的投票选择和对私立学校备选方案的考虑，产生了塑造公立学校的强大的一般均衡力量，但在政策分析中往往被忽视。此外，信息不对称导致国家和地方控制之间的紧张关系，并允许引入增加父母面临的选择集的竞争效应。

The purpose of this a research is to investigate the impact of education policy in a federal system. It utilizes an already developed and successful theoretical model of state and local public finance to derive a computable model that is calibrated to data and extended to apply particularly to education. This model has the advantage that it allows for imperfect stratification of incomes across school districts, the use of various types of tax instruments, and the incorporation of many different kinds of fiscal between state and local governments. Thus, it can be calibrated to the kind of data commonly observed in the US. The model is then modified to make it particularly applicable to public education. Rather than focusing on any one input in the education production process, the model seeks to trace the impact of individual behavior by parents and school officials resulting from changes in incentives brought about by changes in state policies toward public education. In particular, the research focuses on the impact of state policies on school quality, and it defines school quality as an outcome of a process in which, in addition to per pupil spending, such factors as peer quality, parental characteristics, effort by teachers and parents and effective utilization of local information play a significant role. Given the link between a family's residence and its public school, the potential of state policies to impact migration choices by parents is particularly highlighted. This, combined with parental voting choices and the consideration of private school alternatives generates powerful general equilibrium forces that shape public schools but that are often ignored in policy analysis. Furthermore, informational asymmetries give rise to tensions between state and local control and allow for the introduction of competitive effects of increasing the choice set parents face.