An Economic Case against Vouchers: Why Local Public Schools Are a Local Public Good

Statewide voucher plans are consistently rejected in plebiscites. This article explains voters' attachment to public education despite the schools' deficiencies: The public benefit of local schools accrues to parents, not children. Having children in a local school enables adults to get to know other adults better, which in turn reduces the transaction costs of citizen provision of true local public goods. This network of adult acquaintances within the municipality is "community-specific social capital." Vouchers would disperse students from their communities and thereby reduce the communal capital of residents. Voters' implicit understanding of this causes them to reject large-scale voucher plans.

Why Judicial Reversal of Apartheid Made a Difference

Did Buchanan v. Warley\u27 have any practical effect on the economic well-being of black Americans? Michael Klarman argues that it did not, since the enforcement of racial segregation proceeded along other lines, such as regular zoning, racial covenants, informal discrimination, and unofficial violence. David Bernstein disagrees in part with Kiarman\u27s conclusion. He argues that Buchanan v. Warley effectively made more housing available to blacks in urban areas, even if it did not promote racial integration. I second Bernstein\u27s conclusion by putting Buchanan in the context of the urban-economics theory of housing segregation. Because Buchanan helped blacks gain a foothold, albeit a segregated one, in central cities, it was instrumental in facilitating the Great Migration of blacks from the rural South to urban areas in the North. Had Buchanan v. Warley been decided the other way, the American civil rights movement might have played out differently. Without housing in central city areas of the North, blacks would have been less able to generate political support for the federal civil rights legislation of the 1960s. As KIarman has argued elsewhere, the creation of a northern black urban community greatly facilitated this legislation. Without the urban concentration of blacks facilitated by Buchanan v. Warley, the civil rights movement could have been delayed or have found other channels. I use the term apartheid to describe the system at issue in Buchanan instead of segregation because apartheid carries specific connotations of legally enforced residential segregation. Racial segregation exists in American cities, but it is not officially compelled by the law of the land. The law of the land for a long time tolerated and enforced private covenants that had racial exclusion as their objective. And law enforcement officers often looked the other way when private violence excluded blacks from white areas. However, one needs to make a hostile stretch of the English language to characterize the American pattern of segregation since Buchanan v. Warley as apartheid

Neither Creatures of the State nor Accidents of Geography : The Creation of American Public School Districts in the Twentieth Century

American public school districts numbered more than 200,000 in 1910. By 1970 there were fewer than 20,000. The decline was almost entirely accounted for by the consolidation of one-room, rural schools into larger school districts. Education leaders had long urged districts to consolidate, but local residents voted to do so, I argue, only after high school education became widespread. Graduates of one-room schools found it difficult to get into high school. Rural districts that were not making the grade were unattractive to home and farm buyers, and the threat of reduced property values induced voters to agree to consolidate

Exclusionary Zoning and Growth Controls: A Comment on the APA\u27s Endorsement of the Mount Laurel Doctrine

The basis for my argument is literature overlooked by the APA brief. These are articles and books published by economists and by lawyers and planners who have adopted economic analysis. This literature has dominated the intellectual terrain since the late 1970s, which may be why almost none of the APA\u27s references to social science studies of zoning are from the 1980s

Expropiaciones y elección pública: la persuación del precio

El presente trabajo analiza las diferencias entre las denominadas expropiaciones físicas (conocidas en nuestro medio como "meras expropiaciones") y las expropiaciones regulatorias. El autor; en un somero y concreto análisis, profundiza en las razones y consecuencias de por qué en la mayoría de los casos, son las expropiaciones físicas las que reciben un pago o una justa compensación y porqué casi nunca estos pagos son destinados a expropiaciones regulatorias