Over the last forty years, racial minorities in the United States have made substantial progress in achieving greater representation in the legislative arena. However, there is surprisingly little empirical evidence as to whether this has had any direct impact on policy outcomes. Unlike past studies that employed roll-call analysis, this paper analyzes actual policy outcomes from the 1970s to t...

BACKGROUND Body weight is highly associated with overall health status. Being severely thin or obese may impose the risk of many health problems. Early detection of body mass index (BMI) status may help to reduce the associated comorbidities. Although many studies in the literature have investigated the BMI of school adolescents in Malaysia, the data on status of body weight among school adoles...

While residents receive similar benefits from many local government programs, only about one-third of all households have children in public schools. We argue that capitalization of school spending into house prices can encourage even childless residents to support spending on schools. We identify a proxy for the extent of capitalization—the supply of land available for new development—and show...

This article reports on an evaluation of student mental health collaboration activities among California K-12 school districts, counties, and regions.

Background.  School closures are an important mitigation strategy during influenza pandemic: if implemented early in a local outbreak, they can slow the disease spread in the surrounding community. During seasonal influenza epidemics, school closures may occur reactively, after the disease is already widespread in the community. Such reactive closures are often too late to reduce influenza tran...

In this paper we employ a cost indirect output distance function to model school district technology and measure performance. This function has the advantage of readily modeling multiple output production where that production is subject to a budget constraint. It also provides a natural measure of performance which is closely related to Fanell type measures of efficiency. We use this distance ...

We explore the role that choice of comparison groups plays in explaining impasse in teacher contract negotiations. We hypothesize that the negotiators select "comparable" districts in a biased fashion such that teachers' salaries in districts that unions view as comparable are higher than teachers' salaries in districts that school boards view as comparable. We also predict that strike activity...

High ability individuals can be constrained from commensurate employment opportunities due to their geographic location. In the face of physical, informational and social barriers to migration, firms with nation-wide hiring practices can benefit from facilitating the migration of high ability individuals from low employment districts to regions with better employment opportunities. We exploit a...