A School Funding Formula for Philadelphia: Lessons from Urban Districts Across the United States

This report examines how a new, comprehensive state education funding formula, if adopted by Pennsylvania, would impact the School District of Philadelphia. After comparing Philadelphia with 10 other big city districts across the country, the analysis concludes that a state formula based on district needs, demographics, and ability to pay -- such as those used in most states -- would not necessarily provide a substantially higher level of aid for urban districts. Equally important, the analysis finds, is the overall amount of state spending on education. According to the report, per-pupil funding for Philadelphia schools was less than that of seven of the 10 other districts studied­ -- all of which were in states with funding formulas

The taxation of discrete investment choices

Traditional analysis of the taxation of income from capital has focused on the impact of tax on marginal investment decisions; the principal impact of tax on investment is through the cost of capital, and is generally measured by an effective marginal tax rate. In this paper, we consider cases in which investors face a choice between two or more mutually exclusive projects, both of which are expected to earn at least the minimum required rate of return. Examples include the location decisions of multinationals, firms’ choice of technology, and the choice of investment projects in the presence of binding financial constraints. In these cases the choice depends on the effective average tax rate. We propose a measure of this rate and demonstrate its relationship to the conventional effective marginal tax rate. Estimates of both are presented and compared for domestic and international investment in Germany, Japan, the UK and USA between 1979 and 1997.

How has the UK corporation tax raised so much revenue?

We analyse a puzzle in the UK corporation tax: by both historic and international standards corporation tax revenues have been high while the statutory rate has been low. Possible explanations include the following: changes in tax law that may have increased effective tax rates; other factors such as higher profitability or different macro-economic conditions may have led to higher effective tax rates; and finally the size of the corporate sector may have increased. We find evidence for all three explanations, although none would be sufficient in itself. To the extent that higher profits, particularly financial sector profits may have led to high revenues, there are doubts as to whether revenues will continue to be so strong.Corporation tax, revenue

Agglomeration, regional grants and firm location

We examine whether discretionary government grants influence the location of new plants, and how effective these incentives are in the presence of agglomeration and urbanisation externalities. We find evidence that regional industrial structure affects the location of new entrants. Firms in more agglomerated industries locate new plants near to others in the same industry. Firms are also attracted to industrially diversified locations. Foreign multinationals locate new plants near to other foreign-owned plants in the same industry. Fiscal incentives in the form of grants are found to have some effect in attracting plants to specific geographic areas eligible for such aid.Corporation tax

Contrasting the capabilities of building energy performance simulation programs

For the past 50 years, a wide variety of building energy simulation programs have been developed, enhanced and are in use throughout the building energy community. This paper is an overview of a report, which provides up-to-date comparison of the features and capabilities of twenty major building energy simulation programs. The comparison is based on information provided by the program developers in the following categories: general modeling features; zone loads; building envelope and daylighting and solar; infiltration, ventilation and multizone airflow; renewable energy systems; electrical systems and equipment; HVAC systems; HVAC equipment; environmental emissions; economic evaluation; climate data availability, results reporting; validation; and user interface, links to other programs, and availability

Spatial Filtering and Eigenvector Stability: Space-Time Models for German Unemployment Data

Regions, independent of their geographic level of aggregation, are known to be interrelated partly due to their relative locations. Similar economic performance among regions can be attributed to proximity. Consequently, a proper understanding, and accounting, of spatial liaisons is needed in order to effectively forecast regional economic variables. Several spatial econometric techniques are available in the literature, which deal with the spatial autocorrelation in geographically-referenced data. The experiments carried out in this paper are concerned with the analysis of the spatial autocorrelation observed for unemployment rates in 439 NUTS-3 German districts. We employ a semi-parametric approach – spatial filtering – in order to uncover spatial patterns that are consistently significant over time. We first provide a brief overview of the spatial filtering method and illustrate the data set. Subsequently, we describe the empirical application carried out: that is, the spatial filtering analysis of regional unemployment rates in Germany. Furthermore, we exploit the resulting spatial filter as an explanatory variable in a panel modelling framework. Additional explanatory variables, such as average daily wages, are used in concurrence with the spatial filter. Our experiments show that the computed spatial filters account for most of the residual spatial autocorrelation in the data.spatial filtering, eigenvectors, Germany, unemployment