Since the Coleman Report, many have questioned whether public school spending affects student outcomes. The school finance reforms that began in the early 1970s and accelerated in the 1980s caused dramatic changes to the structure of K-12 education spending in the United States. To study the effect of these school finance reform—induced changes in public school spending on long-run adult outcom...

This article provides an analysis of the Scottish Government’s approach to the use of private finance in public services. It examines the budgetary drivers behind the policy in Scotland and assesses its cost-efficiency. In doing so, it considers first the standard private finance initiative (PFI) model, and then turns to the ‘non-profit distributing’ (NPD)model – a variant of PFI developed in S...

Do preferences toward globalization strategies vary across publicfinance regimes? In this paper, we use data on individual preferences toward immigration and trade policy to examine how pre-tax and posttax cleavages differ across globalization strategies and state fiscal jurisdictions. High exposure to immigrant fiscal pressures reduces support for freer immigration among U.S. natives, especial...

Our framework combines features of two distinguished traditions in economics: a public finance tradition and a more recent tradition of business cycle theory. The public finance tradition we follow stems from Ramsey (1927), who considers the problem of choosing an optimal tax structure when only distorting taxes are available. The business cycle tradition we follow stems from Kydland and Presco...

Using a public finance approach, this study investigates welfare costs between seignorage and consumption taxes in a standard growth model. One of these two taxes is used to finance exogenous public spending to balance the government budget. The steady-state welfare cost of consumption taxes is lower if the consumption effect dominates the leisure effect. This paper compares equilibrium along t...