Why Do School District Budget Referenda Fail?

[Excerpt] Public elementary and secondary education is financed in many states at least partially at the local level and school district budgets in many states are determined by voter referenda. To date, however, there have been no studies that sought to explain why the proportion of school district budget proposals in a state that are approved by voters in referenda varies over time. Similarly no research has used panel data on school districts to test whether budget referenda failures are concentrated in a small number of school districts within a state and whether the failure of a budget referendum in a school district in one year influences the likelihood that voters in the district subsequently defeat a budget referendum in the next year. Our paper uses data from school budget votes in New York State to answer these questions

The Effect of Unions on Productivity in the Public Sector: The Case of Municipal Libraries

[Excerpt] This paper represents our initial efforts at analyzing the effects of unions on productivity in the public sector. We first sketch an analytical framework that can be used to estimate these effects, focusing for expository purposes on municipal public libraries. We initially focus on libraries because considerable effort has been devoted to conceptualizing productivity measures for them and because of the availability of data to implement the framework. After discussing the analytical framework, we present preliminary estimtes of the effects of unions on productivity in public libraries based upon analyses of data from 71 municipal libraries in Massachusetts. We conclude by indicating how these analyses will be extended and the direction that we hope our future research will take

Unemployment Insurance, Duration of Unemployment, and Subsequent Wage Gain

[Excerpt] In order to evaluate what the optimal level of UI benefits is, one must therefore first estimate the magnitude of the relationships between UI benefits levels and unemployed workers\u27 durations of unemployment and post-unemployment wages. There have been several previous studies of the impact of UI benefits on duration of spells of unemployment, however none have been completely satisfactory methodologically. To our knowledge, there have been no previous studies of the system\u27s impact on subsequent wage rates. We attempt to fill these gaps, utilizing data from the National Longitudinal Survey (NLS) to estimate both relationships. The plan of our paper is as follows. First, we sketch the implications of theories of job search for our estimating equations. Next, we briefly discuss the NLS data. The following four sections summarize the empirical results we have obtained for four cohorts of data: older males, ages 45-59; women, ages 30-44; and younger males and females, ages 14-24. Finally, we consider the implications of our results for public policy. Due to space limitations our discussion here is necessarily brief and details of our research are found elsewhere

Within State Transitions From 2-Year to 4-Year Public Institutions

[Excerpt] Within many large states there are multiple 2-year and 4-year institutions. In 1998-99, only 19 states had less than 15 public 2-year institutions. Of the 31 states with 15 or more public 2-year institutions, only 3 had 5 or fewer public 4-year institutions. State policymakers and system administrators should want to know how well each 2-year public institution is doing in preparing those of its students who transfer to public 4-year institutions in the state to successfully complete 4-year college study. Similarly, they should want to know how successful each 4-year college in the state is in graduating those students from 2-year colleges that transfer to it. This information could then be used either in summative evaluations that relate to resource allocation decisions, or more preferably, in formative evaluations in which knowledge of the best practices of the most successful institutions are transmitted to their sister institutions in the state. That is, the information could be used to help improve the performance of a state’s public higher education system. Our paper uses data provided to us by the Office of Institutional Research of the State University of New York (SUNY) to illustrate a methodological approach that can be used to address these issues. While the methodology we develop is applied to data from the SUNY system, the paper’s main purpose is to illustrate the methodology because we the approach can be usefully employed in any state that has multiple public 2-year and 4-year institutions. In the next section, we describe the SUNY system, discuss the data to which we have been granted access and sketch out our methodological approach. Empirical findings are provided in the following three sections and the sensitivity of our finding to the specific model estimated and sample of data used are examined. Section VI presents a discussion of the some of the conceptual and statistical limitations of our approach and the types of data that, if available, would improve the analyses

The Sources and Uses of Annual Giving at Private Research Universities

[Excerpt] In 1998-99, Cornell University and Duke University were ranked second and third in the nation, respectively, in terms of the volume of giving each received from external donors. That year Cornell reported receiving $341.3 million in annual giving and Duke reported receiving$331.0 million. The similarity in the total volume of giving that the two institutions received is actually very misleading. Fifty-four percent of Cornell’s gift total came from alumni, while only 15.3% of Duke’s gift total came from alumni. Similarly, 79.7% of Cornell’s gift total came from individuals (alumni plus other individuals) while only 26.2% of Duke’s gifts came from individual donors. Cornell’s giving is clearly much more dependent on individuals than is Duke’s and Duke’s is much more dependent in turn on corporations and foundations. Institutions differ not only in the sources of their annual giving but also in their uses of such funds. For example, during the 1993-94 to 1997-98 period, the average percentages across 78 private research universities of annual giving devoted to current expenditures, building and equipment, and enhancing the endowment were 53.5%, 14.5% and 31.5%, respectively. However, there was wide variation across the institutions in each of these percentages, with the standard deviations of these percentages being 16.9, 12.1 and 15.5, respectively. Our paper addresses why private research universities differ in the sources and uses of their annual giving. The next section provides some background data on the trends and variations in the shares of annual giving coming from and going to different uses. We then use data from a panel of private research universities for the 1968-69 to 1998-99 period to estimate models that provide explanations for why the levels and shares of giving coming from different sources and going to different uses vary across institutions and over time. Our explanations focus both on differences in characteristics of the institutions and differences in macroeconomic variables, such as changes in federal estate, corporate, and capital gains tax rates

Do Tournaments Have Incentive Effects?

Much attention has been devoted to studying models of tournaments or situations in which an individual\u27s payment depends only on his or her output or rank relative to that of other competitors. Academic interest derives from the fact that under certain sets of assumptions, tournaments have desirable normative properties because of the incentive structures they provide. Our paper uses nonexperimental data to test whether tournaments actually elicit effort responses. We focus on professional golf tournaments because information on the incentive structure (prize distribution) and measures of individual output (players\u27 scores) are both available. We find strong support for the proposition that the level and structure of prizes in PGA tournaments influence players\u27 performance

What a Difference a Decade Makes: Growing Wealth Inequality Among Ivy League Institutions

[Excerpt] The eight Ivy League institutions – Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton and Yale - are among our nations most selective undergraduate institutions. They also are among its wealthiest. They compete against each other for top faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, as well as on intercollegiate athletic fields. However, this competition has never taken place on a level “playing field” because of the vast differences in endowment resources that have always existed across the institutions. The prolonged stock market expansion during the 1990s magnified these differences in ways that many still do not fully comprehend

The Incentive Effects of Tournaments Revisited: Evidence From the European PGA Tour

This analysis of data from the 1987 European Men\u27s Professional Golf Association (PGA) Tour strongly supports the hypothesis that the level and structure of prizes in PGA tournaments influence players\u27 performance. Specifically, players\u27 performance appears to vary positively with both the total money prizes awarded in a tournament and the marginal return to effort in the final round of play (a value that varies among players largely depending on how the prize money is allocated among finishers of different ranks). The authors suggest that these results, together with the similar results of their earlier study of the 1984 U.S. Men\u27s PGA Tour, may have implications for the design of compensation systems for certain groups of workers, such as corporate executives, college professors, and salespeople

Within State Transitions from 2-Year to 4-Year Public Institutions

Within many large states there are multiple 2-year and 4-year public institutions. Our paper develops a methodology that can be used to help evaluate how well each 2-year public institution in a state is doing in preparing those of its students who transfer to 4-year public institutions to successfully complete their 4-year programs. Similarly, the methodology can be used to help evaluate how well each 4-year public institution is doing in graduating the those students from 2-year institutions who transfer to it. The methodology is illustrated using data provided by the Office of Institutional Research and Analysis of the State University of New York.

Compensating Wage Differentials for Mandatory Overtime

Our paper estimates the extent to which employees are compensated for an unfavorable job characteristic, being required to accept mandatory assignment of overtime, by receiving higher straight-time wages. Our estimating equations are derived from a model in which wage rates and the existence of mandatory assignment of overtime are jointly determined in the market by the interaction of employee and employer preferences. While - on average, we do not observe the existence of a compensating wage differential for mandatory overtime, we do observe the existence of such differentials for unionized workers and workers with only a few years experience at a firm. Given any estimated compensating wage differential for an unfavorable working condition, one must decide whether its magnitude is sufficiently large to allow one to conclude that the differential fully compensates workers for the disutility of being subject to the unfavorable working condition. We develop and illustrate a methodology that can be used to answer this question, at least for the case of mandatory overtime provisions and other rules that restrict employees' choice of hours.