Justin M. Ross

Tiebout Competition, Yardstick Competition, and Tax Instrument Choice: Evidence from Ohio School Districts

Previous research has shown that Tiebout-style fiscal competition among local governments reduces the likelihood of adopting income taxes. This literature has not yet considered the impact of yardstick competition on tax instrument choice. This article uses spatial econometrics to test for yardstick competition in the decision to adopt an income tax. The results, based on Ohio school district data, indicate that school districts are more likely to adopt an income tax if their neighbors have already done so. While a negative correlation of Tiebout competition on district income tax adoption persists, controlling for spatial dependence reduces the statistical significance of the effect.

Assessor Incentives and Property Assessment

While typically not a formulator of policy, property assessors are likely sensitive to political incentives, since they are either directly elected to their office or appointed by another elected official. This article estimates a model that is motivated by the assumption that assessors seek to maximize political support in a manner that affects the assessment-to-sales price ratio. With panel data from a 2001 to 2006 series of sales price ratio studies in Virginia cities and counties, a fixed effects variance-decomposition regression reveals a variety of socioeconomic and political variables that bias the assessed value away from fair market value. In addition to finding influential socioeconomic factors, the results indicate that elected assessors underassess more than appointed assessors. Furthermore, it appears assessors try to export the property tax onto commercial property, and assessors in districts with higher measures of local government fiscal stress tend to give higher assessments.

The Public Financing of America's Largest Cities: A Study of City Financial Records in the Wake of the Great Recession

This paper employs Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports of the 35 largest population American cities from 2005 to 2011 to examine how these cities managed the Great Recession, which was a global macroeconomic shock particularly damaging to the housing sector. While broader surveys of local government suggest that the Great Recession has been associated with substantive revenue declines, particularly via the property tax, the Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports data indicate that large cities remained relatively stable in revenue by using higher property taxes to compensate for other revenue declines. Furthermore, these cities were able to rely on their net assets to engage in deficit spending. These findings indicate that cities are relying on traditional strengths of local governments, but are also able to engage in the deficit spending that is typically characteristic of national governments. It also seems to be the case that grants for capital projects were largely transferred into highly liquid and spendable assets.

Does State Spending on Mental Health Lower Suicide Rates

Using recently released data on public mental health expenditures by U.S. states from 1997 to 2005, this study is the first to examine the effect of state mental health spending on suicide rates. We find the effect of per capita public mental health expenditures on the suicide rate to be qualitatively small and lacking statistical significance. This finding holds across different estimation techniques, gender, and age groups. The estimates suggest that policies aimed at income growth, divorce prevention or support, and assistance to low income individuals could be more effective at suicide prevention than state mental health expenditures.

Fiscal Illusion from Property Reassessment? An Empirical Test of the Residual View

The property tax rate, according to the residual view, is simply the ratio of levies over total assessed values, so that growth in property values is irrelevant to the revenue raised. Critics of this view claim instead that fiscal illusion allows policymakers to take advantage of increased assessed values to raise additional revenue by not fully reducing the tax rate. Using 2000–2008 data from Virginia cities and counties, this paper tests the competing claims by studying a natural experiment in the timing of mass reappraisals. Our findings provide partial support for the fiscal illusion critique of the residual view.

School District Income Taxes: New Revenue or a Property Tax Substitute?

Using a panel of 609 Ohio school districts from 1990 to 2008, this paper investigates the effects of school district income tax on operating property tax revenue. After correcting for endogeneity, the results do indicate a substitution effect that lowers the property tax levy. Despite reduced property taxes, greater income taxation is mostly to increase total revenues. By how much total revenues increase varies widely depending on the relative and absolute sizes of property and income taxes. We also find that school districts were able to increase the amount of the property tax by a greater amount than nonadopting districts in the years following the adoption of income taxes.

Interjurisdictional Determinants of Property Assessment Regressivity

The previous literature on vertical equity in property assessment has focused on parcel-level data within a single area and has produced mixed conclusions on whether the process is progressive or regressive. This paper advances the discussion to identifying what differences between jurisdictions might account for the mix of findings. Using data from Virginia cities and counties between 2001 and 2007, evidence is presented that indicates having tax maps available online, appointed assessors, and senior citizens all influence the level of regressivity observed between jurisdictions. Overall, the results support the hypothesis that interjurisdictional differences are determinants of vertical inequity.

Frictions in Polycentric Administration with Non-Congruent Borders: Evidence from Ohio School District Class Sizes

Public managers who operate within cross-jurisdictional governance regimes face substantial difficulties in facilitating network collaboration. Scholars have long suggested that non-congruence of geographic borders can create coordination problems among the political communities within polycentric administrative units. A frequently reoccurring example of such coordination problems arises in cases where municipalities and school districts have non-congruent borders, creating fiscal externalities in residential development land use decisions. Using GIS data from 611 Ohio school districts and 1,585 municipalities in 2000, we calculate the degree of non-congruence between school district and municipal territory to test for evidence that non-congruence of municipal-school district borders influences school district class size. The results indicate that schools with non-congruent borders do experience substantively larger class sizes. Furthermore, these effects seem to increase with the degree of non-congruence. Our findings are robust to model specification and consistent across OLS and treatment effects regression estimates. Policy implications for state-encouraged consolidation of school districts are discussed as well as theoretical and empirical implications of non-congruent jurisdictional borders for governance studies more generally.

A Socioeconomic Analysis of Property Assessment Uniformity: Empirical Evidence on the Role of Policy

Though property assessment uniformity has been repeatedly studied as a technical problem related to the difficulty of the task, popular, and policy sentiment against the property tax is frequently directed at the incidence of nonuniformity across socioeconomic groups. Using data from Virginia, this paper brings socioeconomic determinants to the forefront of the analysis and their interaction with policy. Unlike the previous literature that employs controls for the time passed since the last reassessment, this paper consider show policy and socioeconomic variables may exert different influences between assessments. For example, the results indicate that elected and appointed assessors perform similarly during mass reappraisals in terms of maintaining uniformity, but appointed assessors perform far better during nonassessment years.

Managing the Internal Organization of Colleges and Universities

This chapter attempts to shed some light onto two controversies in the management of US colleges and universities: outsourcing and decentralization. We attempt to provide a comprehensive account of when these managerial changes have been, and are likely to be in the future, effective by describing the costs and benefits of both of these management practices. While the discussion generally pertains to the U.S. public universities, most concepts are general enough to apply to all colleges and universities.