Search

An extensive data set on upstate New York school district is used to test whether competition from private schools and competition within the public school sector positively affect public school output and again whether different types of expenditures affect output differently. It finds generally significant positive effects of private competition for some measures of school output, but little if any on measures such as the percent of students receiving high quality statewide Regents diplomas. It also finds that private school competition could reduce spending in the non-instructional categories, while competition from other public schools might encourage it. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper uses a large individual data set from the Euro Barometer Survey (ICPSR 1993) to estimate the influence of religious phenomena on self- perceived satisfaction of an individual, controlling for macroeconomic conditions, effects of his political stance, and other socio-economic variables. Our estimated ordered logit model results show that an individual's life satisfaction is positively related to measures of strong religious attachment in the sense of being willing to commit to attending religious services frequently. Our other findings include that no strong evidence exists for the hypothesis that leftists suffer more from income inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SANDLER and SHELTON [6] recently made a significant contribution to the theory of benefit spillovers in a setting of local governments. Unlike previous authors [1, 2, 3, 7], they have integrated this theory with the possibility of tax exportation. Their analysis allows them to derive certain predictions about the effect of tax exporting on the levels of public good production in both the tax exporting and the tax importing jurisdictions.
This paper does not question the fruitfulness of their approach. It does, however, argue that if different and, perhaps, more realistic assumptions are made about the connection between tax spillouts and the level of public goods actually chosen, then their predictions about the effects on public good output levels may not be valid. Section 1 reiterates the relevant portion of the SANDLER-SHELTON argument. Section 2 presents an alternate formulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]