Neighborhood school characteristics: what signals quality to homebuyers?

Popular wisdom and economic research suggest that the quality of the neighborhood school should be an important determinant of housing values. Many researchers have found that housing values are higher where school spending or student test scores are higher. However, few economists consider these characteristics good indicators of school quality. Meanwhile, no one has examined whether the economists' notion of school quality-the school's marginal effect on students-is a school characteristic that matters to homebuyers. ; Using a model of new home purchases and historical data on homes in the Dallas Independent School District (DISD), Kathy Hayes and Lori Taylor demonstrate that property values do reflect the characteristics of the neighborhood school. They present evidence that property values reflect student test scores but not school expenditures. Interestingly, they also find that the relationship between test scores and property values arises from an underlying relationship between property values and the marginal effects of schools. Thus, their analysis suggests that homebuyers and economists share the same definition of school quality.Education ; Property tax

Ratings of source credibility in relation to level of vocal variety, sex of the source, and sex of the receiver.

Pitch, rate, volume, and intensity express and evoke meaning and emotion that a verbal message cannot communicate by itself. The question arises, however, as to how much variety within the voice is desirable for the source of the message to appear most credible today in the United States. How much does the level of vocal variety affect source credibility? Does limited variability in paralinguistic cues significantly damage the perceived credibility of the source? Is it possible to have too much vocal variety in the delivery of a message

Building the Beginnings of a Beautiful Partnership

The authors describe the process leading to, and the outcome of, their partnership to build and operate a 76,000 square foot public/ community college joint use library. Located in Westminster, Colorado, the College Hill Library serves a population of approximately 70,000 Westminster residents and 6,000 Front Range Community College faculty and staff. The partnership began in 1994 to investigate the feasibility of building the facility, which opened in April 1998 and continues to be successful today. The authors provide information on the main points of the Intergovernmental Agreement to build and operate the facility and relate their experiences during the planning, construction, and initial year of operation of the library. They discuss issues relating to combining staff, automation systems, and collections as well as special challenges in publicizing the library to the community. An update on the current state of the partnership is provided by the current co-directors of the library.published or submitted for publicatio

On the political economy of school deregulation

Education

Allocative inefficiency in education

Education

Unbuilt Clemson: a story of institutional resilience

Unbuilt Clemson (slated for publication in Spring 2020 by Clemson University Press) is an in-depth excavation—from institutional records, archival evidence, and oral histories—of selected unrealized building projects throughout the history of campus development and planning at Clemson University, with a focus on projects developed to the building design or site plan stage. Six chapters, a dozen case studies, and 50+ illustrations will span the years 1890-2017, documenting how campus planners both shaped and accommodated Clemson’s evolution from an all-male, cadet-corps “agricultural and mechanical” college to a 21st-century, nationally-ranked Carnegie R-1 institution with an international student body and an expanding global network of government, business, and industry partnerships. Telling Clemson’s development history through the lens of unbuilt projects reconstitutes a more complete and inclusive institutional biography, one that acknowledges diverging visions, competing priorities and ideologies, rejected possibilities, winners and losers, even lost opportunities on the part of campus leaders, whether faculty, administrators, or benefactors. Central to our narrative is the school’s accelerating pursuit of a ‘campus master plan’/multi-year ‘strategic plan’ ethos, one progressively in sync with the professionalization of both planning and university administration—first nationally, then regionally—starting in the mid-20th century. At the same time, our account never loses sight of the indelible influence Clemson’s plantation legacy continues to exert on the campus environment, physically and ideologically, and the inherent tension between that legacy and the university’s land-grant, public higher education mandate

Allocative inefficiency and school competition

A substantial literature indicates that the public school system in the United States is inefficient. Some have posited that this inefficiency arises from a lack of competition in the education market. On the other hand, the Tiebout hypothesis suggests that public schools may already face significant competition. In this paper, the authors examine the extent to which competition for students influences public school inefficiency in Texas. They use a Shephard input distance function to model education production and use bootstrapping techniques to examine allocative inefficiencies. Switching regressions estimation suggests that school districts in noncompetitive metropolitan areas are more than twice as allocatively inefficient as school districts in competitive metropolitan areas.Competition ; Education

On competition and school efficiency

Education

The Embedded Health Management Academic: A Boundary Spanning Role for Enabling Knowledge Translation; Comment on “CIHR Health System Impact Fellows: Reflections on ‘Driving Change’ Within the Health System”

Healthcare organisations are looking at strategies and activities to improve patient outcomes, beyond clinical interventions. Increasingly, health organisations are investing significant resources in leadership, management and team work training to optimise professional collaboration, shared decision-making and, by extension, high quality services. Embedded clinical academics are a norm in, and considered a strength of, healthcare organisations and universities. Their role contributes, formally and informally, to clinical teaching, knowledge sharing and research. An equivalent, but significantly less common role, addressing the management of healthcare organisations, is the embedded health management academic (EHMA). A stimulus encouraging this intertwined embedded academic role, in both clinical and managerial fields, is the demand for the translation of knowledge between academic and industry contexts. In this essay, we describe the EHMA role, its value, impact and potential for enabling healthcare organisation improvement. Focusing on the business of healthcare, the EHMA is a conduit between sectors, stakeholders and activities, enabling different organisations and experts to co-create, share and embed knowledge. The value and impact achieved is significant and ongoing, through the nurturing of an evidence-based management culture that promotes ongoing continuous improvement and research activities

The Clustering of Financial Services in London*

This paper reports a one-year study which investigated the clustering of financial services activity in London. A questionnaire asking about the advantages and disadvantages of a London location was sent to a stratified sample of 1,500 firms and institutions. In addition, thirty-nine on-site interviews with firms, professional institutions, government bodies and other related agencies were conducted. The study finds that banking, including investment banking, forms the cluster’s hub with most other companies depending on relationships with this sub-sector. Generally, the cluster confers many advantages to its incumbents including enhanced reputation, the ability to tap into large, specialized labor pool and customer proximity. The localized nature of relationships between skilled labor, customers and suppliers is a critical factor which helps firms achieve innovative solutions, develop new markets and attain more efficient ways to deliver services and products. Particularly important are the personal relationships which are enhanced by the on-going face-to-face contact that is possible in a compact geographical space. Many of the cluster’s advantages are dynamic in that they become stronger as agglomeration increases. The study also finds important disadvantages in the cluster which threaten its future growth and prosperity. These include the poor quality and reliability of transport, particularly the state of the London Underground and links to airports, increasing levels of regulation and government policy that is not co-ordinated with the whole of the cluster in mind. Key words: Industrial clustering, agglomeration, financial services.