State and local governments face substantial unfunded liabilities from other post-employment benefits (OPEB), primarily retiree health care. While pension policies provide useful lessons, OPEB presents distinct challenges: it is minimally prefunded, more legally flexible, and highly sensitive to rising health care costs. This article examines strategies to address escalating retiree health care costs, including benefit adjustments, higher retiree contributions, full prefunding, and partial prefunding approaches. Our analysis shows that, except in districts with steeply declining revenues, combining moderate benefit changes with partial prefunding can stabilize costs for most districts, though implementing such measures will require navigating politically challenging trade-offs.

Racially segregated schools influence the distribution of educational opportunity. When students of different races enroll in separate schools, systematic differences in access to school resources and exposure to high levels of student need can emerge. Using recently available national school-level finance data, we find that typical Black and Hispanic students attend schools with higher per-pupil spending but also higher proportions of low-income students and English learners than typical White students living in the same metropolitan area. Drawing on estimates of the additional spending required to provide high-need students with equal educational opportunities, we find that cost-adjusted spending in the average Black and Hispanic students’ schools ranges from zero to 17.2% less than that in the average White students’ schools. Racial disparities in cost-adjusted spending are larger in the largest metropolitan areas and in the Northeast, indicating that many Black and Hispanic students are disadvantaged by these inequities.

Adverse effects of the opioid crisis on individuals influence the need for state and local government expenditures and erode their tax bases. Systematic estimates of the magnitude of such fiscal impacts are lacking. We estimate the magnitude of the effect of the opioid crisis on state and local expenditures and discuss approaches that might be taken to evaluate the impact of the crisis on revenues. We find that the fiscal impacts of the opioid crisis on state and local governments are modest for the U.S. as a whole but are likely to be greater in states with particularly high rates of opioid-use disorders. Our analysis aims to encourage and guide more in-depth studies in the future. Such studies can inform intergovernmental aid policies designed to offset the fiscal impacts of opioid misuse and can also contribute to assessing damages in opioid lawsuits.

This paper studies two novel productivity characteristics of foreign acquisition on high-tech manufacturing firms: the dynamic and the non-Hicks-neutral effects. A dynamic productivity effect of foreign ownership arises when adoption of foreign technology and management practices takes time to fully realize. Furthermore, these dynamic adjustments may be capital or labor augmenting as adoption of advanced production technologies tends to have non-neutral productivity implications in developed countries. We propose and implement an econometric framework to estimate both effects using firm-level data from China's manufacturing sector. Our framework extends the nonparametric productivity framework developed by Gandhi, Navarro and Rivers (2020), in which identification is achieved using a firm's first-order conditions and timing assumptions. We find strong evidence of dynamic and non-neutral effects from foreign ownership, with significant differences across investment sources. Investment from OECD sources is found to provide a long-term productivity boost for all but the largest recipients, while that from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan does not raise performance. These findings have implications for China's declining labor share and for the rising domestic value-added content of its high-tech exports.

Charter schools can influence a school district's costs by reducing economies of scale and by changing the share of high cost students a district serves, but might also increase the district's efficiency through competition. Utilizing data for New York State school districts from 1998/99 to 2013/14, we estimate difference-in-differences models to assess the effect of charter schools on enrollment and student composition. Then, we estimate an expenditure function, using data prior to the charter school program, to measure the costs associated with reaching a given performance standard for students in various need categories and different enrollments. Next, using the entire data set, we run a second expenditure function to determine changes in efficiency associated with charter school entry. We find that charter schools increase the cost of providing education, and that these cost increases are larger than short-run efficiency gains, but are offset by efficiency gains in the long term.

A growing number of cities and states have been providing large tuition subsidies for residents through initiatives often called “place‐based” or “Promise” scholarship programs. We examine the effects of a prominent last‐dollar, place‐based scholarship program, Say Yes to Education in Buffalo, NY, on college matriculation and persistence. Employing a difference‐in‐differences strategy comparing changes across cohorts of students eligible and ineligible for large college scholarships, we find that scholarship eligibility is associated with an increase of 20 percent in the likelihood of matriculating into college within one year of graduation, and an increase in the likelihood of persistence into a second year of college of nearly 16 percent. Increases in matriculation are largely at four‐year institutions, where most of the additional funding from Say Yes is concentrated, exclusively at in‐state institutions, both public and private, and are largest at colleges with more selective admission rates. Finally, we see the largest increases in matriculation and persistence among students who attend high schools in the middle third of the poverty distribution. These results suggest that the additional aid provided by Say Yes plays an important role in increasing college matriculation and encouraging students to attend more selective schools.

This paper studies testing of shifts in a time trend panel data model with serially correlated error component disturbances, without any prior knowledge of whether the error term is stationary or nonstationary. This is done in case the shift is known as well as unknown. Following Vogelsang (1997) in the time series literature, we propose a Wald type test statistic that uses a fixed effects feasible generalized least squares (FE-FGLS) estimator derived in Baltagi, et al. (2014). The proposed test has a Chi-square limiting distribution and is valid for both I (0) and I (1) errors. The finite sample size and power of this Wald test is investigated using Monte Carlo simulations.

Using a newly compiled dataset, we measure the effects of participatory budgeting on the allocation of capital funding among areas of different income levels within New York City council districts. A difference‐in‐differences design compares changes in the allocation of funding in adopting districts before and after the adoption of participatory budgeting to changes over the same period among a control group consisting of later adopters. On average, adopting districts increase funding in the next to the lowest income census tracts more than the control group, but participatory budgeting does not redirect funds to the lowest income census tracts.

We estimate the effects of accountability-driven school closure in New York City on students who attended middle schools that were closed at the time of closure and students who would have likely attended a closed middle school had it remained open. We find that students who would have entered the closed school had it not closed attended schools that perform better on standardized exams and have higher value-added measures than did the closed schools. While we find that closure did not have any measurable effect on the average student in this group, we do find that high-performing students in this group attended higher-performing schools and experienced economically-meaningful and statistically-significant improvements in their 6th-, 7th-, and 8th-grade math test scores. We find that these benefits persisted for several cohorts after closure. We also find that closure adversely affected students, low-performing students in particular, who were attending schools that closed. For policymakers, our results highlight a key trade-off of closing a low-performing school: future cohorts of relatively high-performing students may benefit from closure while low-performing students in schools designated for closure are adversely affected.

We find evidence of enrollment increases in both Syracuse and Buffalo following the announcement of a placed-based scholarship program, Say Yes to Education. While the Syracuse increases were accompanied by enrollment declines in surrounding suburban districts, the Buffalo increases coincided with declines in private school enrollments. Buffalo and Rochester also saw enrollment increases relative to trends following the announcement of Say Yes in Syracuse, suggesting that part of the increase in Syracuse might be attributable to factors other than Say Yes. We also find evidence of increases in home prices in Syracuse after the program's announcement, as well as decreases in the surrounding suburbs. We do not find evidence of similar housing price changes in Buffalo.

This paper studies the fact that 37 percent of the internal migrants in China do not sign a labor contract with their employers, as revealed in a nationwide survey. These contract-free jobs pay lower hourly wages, require longer weekly work hours, and provide less insurance or on-the-job training than regular jobs with contracts. We find that the co-villager networks play an important role in a migrant’s decision on whether to accept such insecure and irregular jobs. By employing a comprehensive nationwide survey in 2011 in the spatial autoregressive logit model, we show that the common behavior of not signing contracts in the covillager network increases the probability that a migrant accepts a contract-free job. We provide three possible explanations on how networks influence migrants’ contract decisions: job referral mechanism, limited information on contract benefits, and the "mini labor union" formed among co-villagers, which substitutes for a formal contract. In the sub-sample analysis, we also find that the effects are larger for migrants whose jobs were introduced by their co-villagers, male migrants, migrants with rural Hukou, short-term migrants, and less educated migrants. The heterogeneous effects for migrants of different employer types, industries, and home provinces provide policy implications. JEL No. O15, R12, J14

Legislation authorizing charter schools in North Carolina was passed in 1996, and the first charter schools opened in fall 1997. Charter schools in North Carolina can be authorized by a local district, the state university, or the state Board of Education, but final approval must come from the state Board of Education. The analysis in this chapter is based primarily on administrative data provided by the North Carolina Education Research Data Center for five cohorts of students. Each cohort contains the universe of students in third grade in North Carolina public schools in 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2000 and follows them through eighth grade or until the 2001–2002 school year, whichever comes first. The authors' analysis is based on the specific choices charter school families made in five North Carolina metropolitan areas. The findings in the chapter raise serious concerns about North Carolina's charter school program.

Background: “Place-based” scholarships seek to improve student outcomes in urban school districts and promote urban revitalization in economically challenged cities. Say Yes to Education is a unique district-wide school reform effort adopted in Syracuse, NY, in 2008. It includes full-tuition scholarships for public and private universities, coupled with extensive wraparound support services in schools. Objectives: This study uses synthetic control methods to evaluate the effect of Say Yes on district enrollment and graduation rates. It also introduces the synthetic control method and provides guidance for its use in evaluating single-site interventions. Method: Combining school district-level data from the National Center for Education Statistics’ Common Core of Data and New York State School Report Cards, this article uses synthetic control methods to construct a synthetic comparison district to estimate counterfactual enrollment and graduation trends for Syracuse. Results: We find that Say Yes to Education was associated with enrollment increases in the Syracuse City School District, a district that had previously experienced decades of sustained enrollment declines. We do not find consistent evidence of changes in graduation rates following adoption of the program. Conclusions: Graduation rate analyses demonstrate that estimates of treatment effects can be sensitive to choices that the researcher has to make in applying synthetic control methods, particularly when pretreatment outcome measures appear to have considerable amounts of noise.

This article identifies a set of location incentives created by New York's charter school financing and accountability provisions. We then use regression models to examine the location of charter schools across and within districts. We find that charter schools (1) are significantly more likely to locate in districts with high operating expenses per pupil, and thus high charter school payments; (2) consistent with the incentive to attract high-achieving students, tend to locate in areas with higher levels of adult education; and (3) tend to serve fewer high-need students than the nearby traditional public schools, which is consistent with a strategy of targeting relatively low-cost students. In addition, we find that charter schools tend to locate in areas with lower teacher wages, lower rents, and higher commercial vacancy rates. This evidence suggests that charter school finance and accountability policy may well influence charter school location decisions, and more generally, that charter school supply is responsive to financial considerations.