Three Essays in Local Public Finance

This dissertation targets three questions relating to local public finance. Given the importance of local public finance on the average person's everyday life (consider the state of local roads and schools), understanding economic elements associated with local revenue generation are integral to our knowledge of how municipalities can affect their local fiscal situation. To this end, three essays are provided here to consider two major topics; capitalization effects, and local budget composition issues. The first two chapters discuss how local public services, in particular fire stations, police stations, and hospitals, can impact the value of nearby land. In particular, the first chapter concentrates on how single family home values will, on average, decrease in value if they are located too close to these emergency service stations, but can also decrease in value if they are located too distantly. Understanding these effects and modeling them are the targets of the first essay. Incorporating similar ideas, the second chapter utilizes the same stations, but now tackles the question of how these services can affect non-residential structures such as office buildings, retail centers, and manufacturing plants. Of interest here is the large heterogeneity of land use, leading to concerns over prior research and its tendency to aggregate land uses when considering these capitalization effects. The final chapter utilizes fiscal override and budget data to analyze how changes in local budget composition can be driven by fiscal overrides in revenue constrained municipalities. When communities are fiscally constrained in their ability to raise own-source revenue, local budget officials may be incentivized to use voter approved fiscal overrides and local budget fungibility to drive expenditures into different portions of the budget. Findings suggest that local budget composition tends to favor certain kinds of spending, such as public works, over other types such as education

Lock-In and Team Effects: Recruiting and Success in College Football Athletics

How important is recruiting to a football program’s success? While prior research has attempted to answer this question, we utilize an extensive panel set covering 13 years of games along with a two-stage least squares approach to investigate the effects of recruiting on team success. This article also includes new control variables to account for omitted variable bias that prior work may have missed. We also split our sample to investigate whether recruiting displays heterogeneous effects across schools. Additionally, we find evidence that the benefits of recruiting are driven by team-specific effects, indicating that team success may be more heavily derived from the ability of teams to harness and improve their recruits than their ability to utilize each athlete’s raw abilities. This leads to important revelations regarding future research into both the value of recruits and what drives a football team’s success.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline