The effect of Walmart on the tax base: evidence from New Jersey

This paper measures the impact of 30 Walmart openings on the municipal tax base using panel data for New Jersey municipalities from 1998-2007. We consider the impact of the new Walmart on the home municipality as well as the nearest adjacent municipality in the year the outlet opens as well as the two subsequent years. Because Walmart may exert differing effects on residential and non-residential values, we undertake separate analyses of the impact of Walmart on the residential and non-residential tax bases. We find that a new Walmart has a significant positive impact on the growth in the tax base in host municipalities the second year that it is open, but not in years one and three. In addition, the impact of the Walmart on the growth in the tax base depends on the size of the municipality. In the average-sized municipality, the real equalized tax base growth rate rises only about 0.35 percentage points in the second year. This effect is primarily the result of Walmart’s impact on residential values in the host municipality. By contrast, a new Walmart causes a modest but consistently negative effect on growth of the tax base in the adjacent municipality across all three years that we are able to measure. In the average sized municipality for our sample, the real equalized tax base growth rate falls rate falls 0.065, 0.081, and 0.096 percentage points, respectively. This effect occurs primarily through the Walmart’s impact on growth of non-residential values. The cumulative effect of this reduction in growth in the adjacent municipality is roughly two thirds of the increase in growth experienced by the home municipality.Tax Base, Walmart, Retailing, Big Box

Provision of An Equitable Public School Finance Structure in Georgia

This report presents options for reducing inequities in the funding of Georgia's public school districts

Financing Georgia's Schools: A Primer

Georgia's nearly 1.5 million students make it the ninth largest state K-12 school system in the United States. Furthermore, Georgia has one of the fastest growing school enrollments in the nation, registering an increase of 12.2 percent between 1996 and 2002. Educating these students requires substantial financial resources. The purpose of this Primer is to explain how education in Georgia is financed and to point out some of the major school financing issues confronting the state. Report No.8

A Closed-Form Approximated Expression for the Residual ISI Obtained by Blind Adaptive Equalizers with Gain Equal or Less than One

In this paper we propose for the real and two independent quadrature carrier case, a closed-form approximated expression for the achievable residual Inter-Symbol Interference (ISI) that depends on the step-size parameter, equalizer’s tap length, equalized output gain, input signal statistics, channel power and SNR. This expression is valid for blind adaptive equalizers, where the error that is fed into the adaptive mechanism which updates the equalizer‘s taps can be expressed as a polynomial function of order three of the equalized output and where the gain between the input and equalized output signal is less than or equal to one, as is in the case of Godard (gain = 1) and WNEW (gain < 1) algorithm. Since the channel power is measurable or can be calculated if the channel coefficients are given, there is no need to carry out simulation with various step-size parameters in order to reach the required residual ISI. In addition, we show two new equalization methods (gain dependent), which have shown to have improved equalization performance compared to Godard and WNEW

Growth and Fiscal Health in Wisconsin Cities

The intent of the applied research reported in this paper is to examine the relationship between growth and the fiscal health of a subset of local governments (incorporated cities) over the last decade. While any number of researchers has raised this question, the literature has tended to focus on larger urban areas during economic downturns. Ladd's (1994) most recent research looking at the fiscal effects of growth has become perhaps the most influential in this line of work. Ladd's research, however, is limited in that she focused on per capita spending, a variable of interest in itself and because it can be conceptually linked to service quality and tax burden. While the data used in her analysis do not reflect a period of economic downturn, the data are for large counties from across the U.S. The analysis presented in this paper is intended to explore of the impact of growth on the fiscal health of smaller local governments. Annual data for Wisconsin cities from 1991 to 1998 are analyzed in this study. Six measures are used to capture different aspects of fiscal health. Changes in these measures in relation to changes in population, property values, and income are evaluated through a series of tests of subsample equivalence and regression analysis.