Does the United States Spend Enough on Public Schools?

 [[{“value”:”I remain happy to provoke my readers: The United States ranks low among peer countries on the ratio of teacher spending to per capita GDP. Is this (in)efficient? Using a spatial equilibrium model we show that spending on schools is efficient if an increase in school spending funded through local taxes would leave house prices
The post Does the United States Spend Enough on Public Schools? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.”}]] 

I remain happy to provoke my readers:

The United States ranks low among peer countries on the ratio of teacher spending to per capita GDP. Is this (in)efficient? Using a spatial equilibrium model we show that spending on schools is efficient if an increase in school spending funded through local taxes would leave house prices unchanged. By exploiting plausibly exogenous shocks to both school spending and taxes, paired with 25 years of national data on local house prices, we find that an exogenous tax-funded increase in school spending would significantly raise house prices. These findings provide causal evidence that teacher spending in the U.S. is inefficiently low.

That is from a new paper by Patrick J. Bayer, Peter Q. Blair, and Kenneth Whaley.  Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

The post Does the United States Spend Enough on Public Schools? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

 Data Source, Economics, Education