Eugenia Froedge Toma

Debt in a model of tax competition

Abstract This paper develops a two-jurisdiction, two-period model of tax competition where jurisdictions can finance government spending not only with current tax revenues but also with debt. Jurisdictions will have an incentive to issue debt because it reduces the standard tax competition problem of underprovision of government goods. Because the underprovision problem becomes more severe in the period when debt is retired, the net effects on deadweight loss from tax competition cannot be signed.

Variation in state education policies and effects on student performance

There have been few systematic studies of the effects that education policies adopted at the state level have on the quality of schooling within the state. This article, building on a framework developed by Eric Hanushek and Lori Taylor, measures the effects of state policies-in particular, the effects of state teacher certification requirements on SAT performance across states. In an examination of SAT data from 1972 to 1990, the results suggest that students in states with a masters degree requirement for teacher certification had lower SAT scores than students in states without a masters requirement. The empirical model accounts for inputs such as family background and other school factors typically used in education production functions.

Boards of trustees, agency problems, and university output

Concluding commentsThe analysis and empirical evidence in this paper indicate that the structure of the boards of trustees of state universities influences the provision of higher education. The structure of the boards is important because it helps to define the constraints on the board members and on the internal agents of the universities. An implication of this study is that public universities can be made to function more like private ones by placing them under separate governing boards.These results are especially interesting when examining the trends regarding board structures. The trend over this century across the states has been toward increasing the number of universities under the jurisdiction of a single board. This analysis suggests that the trend is a response to political pressure from educators, not from taxpayers and consumers of higher education.

Home Schooling: An Alternative School Choice

There is a fairly large, evolving literature on school choice. This literature addresses the factors that influence the choice between schools in the public and private sectors. Overlooked by this literature, however, is the growing segment of school enrollment in home schools. This article empirically examines the decision to educate children at home. The empirical results suggest that the decision to home school depends on the expected quality of schooling the home unit can produce relative to that available from alternatives. More specifically, our results indicate that womens educational attainment helps explain home school enrollment, that greater heterogeneity of income within a public school district increases home enrollment, and that stricter regulations decrease home school enrollment.

Central bankers, bureaucratic incentives, and monetary policy

1. Central Bankers, Bureaucratic Incentives, and Monetary Policy: An Introduction.- I. Structure of Central Bank Financing and Bureaucratic Rents.- 2. Monetary Policy: Theory and Practice.- 3. Inflationary Bias of the Federal Reserve System: A Bureaucratic Perspective.- 4. Preliminary Evidence on the Use of Inputs in the Federal Reserve System.- 5. Human Capital and Bureaucratic Inertia: The Use of Inputs by the Federal Reserve.- II. The Organization of Central Bank Bureaus and the Problems of Control.- 6. The Choice of Monetary Instruments and the Theory of Bureaucracy.- 7. Bureaucratic Theory and the Choice of Central Bank Goals.- 8. Research Activities and Budget Allocations Among Federal Reserve Banks.- 9. Banking Sector Influence on the Relationship of Congress to the Federal Reserve System.- III. Political Pressures, Bureaucratic Incentives, and Monetary Policy.- 10. Politics and Fed Policymaking.- 11. Central Bank Independence: An International Comparison.- 12. A Private Central Bank: Some Olde English Lessons.- IV. Conclusion.- 13. Central Bankers and the Issue of Independence.- Contributors.

Tax Collection with Agency Costs: Private Contracting or Government Bureaucrats?

Historically, governments contracted with private agents known as tax farmers to collect taxes. This paper develops a theoretical framework for determining when a welfare-maximizing government should choose tax farmers over bureaucratic tax collectors. While bureaucratic collectors have an incentive to shirk and raise collection costs above least costs, profit-maximizing private collectors tend to reduce tax evasion below the optimal level. Generally, the choice of collection methods depends on a comparison of the welfare loss associated with monitoring in the bureaucratic setting and the welfare loss associated with overdetection of evasion in the private setting. Copyright 1992 by The London School of Economics and Political Science.

Public Employee Quality in a Geographic Context: A Study of Rural Teachers

Recruiting high quality employees is one of the key functions of public human resource managers and a critical component of effective public service delivery. This is particularly true in education but little is known about public sector or teacher hiring patterns in areas that are predominantly rural, poor, and isolated from other locales. This article begins to fill that gap. We find that rural educational agencies employ the new teachers of lowest observed aptitude, implying that organizational outcomes associated with these districts may differ in systematic ways that reinforce longstanding gaps in quality. As such, human resources strategies for increasing the attractiveness of geographically and culturally isolated regions for high quality public service are needed. These strategies are likely to require different policy prescriptions than those utilized to enhance the attractiveness to employees in urban areas.

Beyond Achievement: Enrollment Consequences of Charter Schools in Michigan

One of the biggest public school reform movements in the past decade has been the passage of charter school laws. Forty states and Washington, DC have approved legislation that allows charter schools to operate within their jurisdictional boundaries. The academic research thus far has focused on where charter schools have been located and the achievement consequences of the schools. This paper addresses a direct effect of charter schools by examining their enrollment consequences. We find that in Michigan approximately 17 percent of the students who enroll in charter schools were previously enrolled in private schools and approximately 83 percent move from the traditional public schools.

State university boards of trustees: A principal-agent perspective

This paper extends the economic theory of organizations by examining the structure of boards of trustees in public university settings. A major implication of the analysis is that the structure of the board of trustees reflects the costs to politicians of allowing internal agent shirking. Empirical evidence supports this hypothesis and indicates that a system method of governing versus individual board governance of universities is linked to the influence of educators in the political process.

A contractual model of the voting behavior of the supreme court: The role of the chief justice

Abstract Political scientists have long debated the role of the Supreme Court in public policymaking. Much of the debate has centered around the issue of judicial independence from political factors. Despite a rather extensive debate in the literature, the question of independence has rarely been subjected to systematic testing. This paper examines the role of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in linking decisions of the Court to the desires of Congress. Specifically, the paper focuses on the role of the Supreme Court Chief Justice as an agent of Congress that reacts to budgetary signals sent by the Congress. The resulting relationship between budgets allocated to the Court and decisions reached by the Court are analyzed from 1946 to 1988.