This paper examines how school districts change teacher salaries in response to large changes in revenue. Using district-level salary schedule data for nearly all California school districts, we analyze two time periods: one with a decrease in funding (2007-08 to 2011-12 marked by the Great Recession) and one with a significant increase in funding…

New York State (NYS) launched the Excelsior Scholarship in 2017. It is designed to make college tuition-free for students who attend publicly funded institutions and meet certain criteria. Is this scholarship a good investment for taxpayers of NYS? How long does it take taxpayers to recover their investment? This case analysis takes a perspective…

Scholars and policymakers want to know how much investment is sufficient to attain high-performing schools. Examining education spending in a highly regarded education system can yield insights for the United States. This paper explores conceptualizations and applications of adequacy in the United States and the Republic of Korea. Our exploratory…

A new approach is suggested that depends on and measures how spending on higher and basic education is really an investment in the future, not consumption spending. This is a vital distinction because investment in human capital contributes heavily to growth and development, but also to higher state tax revenue and lower Medicaid, child care,…

The goal of this article is to explore the heterogeneity of state investments in elementary and secondary education over the period from 1993 to 2013, evaluating both the level of funding over time and the extent to which funding is targeted to districts serving high-poverty populations. This paper then explores a) whether those levels and…

Child poverty is a growing problem that adversely affects both future society and the poor children themselves. This paper's purpose is to investigate the intergenerational links between education and poverty. Israel serves as an interesting case study because it has exhibited an incremental trend in child poverty between 1980 and 2010 (from 5% to…

The institutional costs of higher education have been rising. With diminishing public support per student, tuition and fees private costs have also been rising. But so have the real earnings of college graduates. Are there still sufficient incentives on efficiency grounds for additional public investment in higher education? And in particular,…

The use of negotiated bank charges, short-term lines of credit, $0 minimum checking balances, and investment of cash balances in short-term investments could gain thousands of additional dollars for school districts. (Author)

Discusses the projected benefits, costs, and rates of return on human and physical capital expenditures for education and condiders alternative areas of educational investment in an effort to determine which specific expenditure areas are potentially most advantageous. (Author/JG)

Analyzes ways in which asset allocation, investment guidelines and objectives, and investment performance may create indirect income redistribution among institutional constituents, including redistribution from future to present constituents. Comments on the implications of inflation and deflation for these aspects of endowment fund management.…

Discusses problems in applying cost-benefit analysis to higher education, including selecting the correct productivity index, determining the discount rate for social consumption foregone, measuring individual and social costs and benefits, and defining the time horizon for educational investment returns. Contrasts cost-benefit and…

Illustrates how nonendowment cash flows (tuition, grants, and gifts) affect the portfolio allocation decisions for the endowment and are "efficient" in terms of the total wealth of the institution. A mathematical appendix displays the reasoning behind the model. (Contains 12 references and 4 tables.) (Author/MLF)

Describes how school districts may significantly reduce the interest paid on school building bonds in states where the law permits advance refunding of school bond issues in response to declining interest rates. Presents two examples of how Indiana school districts used advance refunding to reduce the cost of debt service. (JG)

Discusses the difficulty of calculating an accurate rate of return for investment in education, focusing in particular on the methods and arguments used by Schultz in his 1961 article, "Education and Economic Growth," and argues that recent overinvestment in American education has lowered its economic efficiency. (JG)

Worsening economic conditions, reflected in mounting external debt, debt service, and structural adjustment processes have forced governments to reveal their expenditure priorities, which are largely against human capital investment activities like education. This paper examines this phenomenon, using cross-country data for Sub-Saharan Africa.…