Lawrence W. Kenny

Did Women's Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?

This paper examines the growth of government during this century as a result of giving women the right to vote. Using cross‐sectional time‐series data for 1870–1940, we examine state government expenditures and revenue as well as voting by U.S. House and Senate state delegations and the passage of a wide range of different state laws. Suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue and more liberal voting patterns for federal representatives, and these effects continued growing over time as more women took advantage of the franchise. Contrary to many recent suggestions, the gender gap is not something that has arisen since the 1970s, and it helps explain why American government started growing when it did.

The Effect of the Expansion of the Voting Franchise on the Size of Government

This paper examines the claim that expansion of the voting franchise has been an important factor in the growth of government. State government spending and state and local spending are explained using a panel of 46 states for 1950-88. Elimination of poll taxes and literacy tests led to higher turnout, particularly among the poor, and a poorer pivotal voter. As predicted, we find that these changes, a fall in the income of voters relative to state income, and the ouster of Republicans from state government led to a sharp rise in welfare spending but no change in other spending.

Economies of scale in schooling

Abstract A model of optimal school size is developed which predicts that schools will minimize total costs by operating in a region of increasing returns to school inputs. Two sources of estimates of the economies of scale coefficient emerge from the optimal school size model, and two rich data sets are used to generate estimates of this coefficient. These estimates support the model and are shown to imply sizeable differences in the cost of schooling between urban and rural areas.

The ineffectiveness of school inputs: a product of misspecification?

Abstract Two-thirds of education production function studies relating learning to school and parental inputs also include parental income. This confounds demand and production functions, since in demand functions income determines the school inputs used in the production function. In a comprehensive review of the literature, we show that with this misspecification significantly positive school input coefficients are 39% less common. Then, with Project TALENT student-level data from 1960 and pooled state data for 1987–1992, we examine the impact of including income with no other change in specification. This causes most school inputs to become less significant. Hausman tests suggest that in OLS regressions there is a correlation between the school input measures and the error term, perhaps due to the omission of a good measure of parental time with the student. This appears to bias the school input coefficients toward zero, but can be corrected with IV methods. [JEL I21, H52, H42]

The decline in the number of school districts in the U.S.: 1950-1980"

Between 1950 and 1980 the number of school districts fell from 83,642 to 15,987. Data for the fifty states for 1950, 1960, 1970, and 1980 are used to identify the factors that contributed to this decline. The focus is on the tradeoff between cost savings through scale economies (a few large districts) and a diverse populations demand for choice in public schooling (many small districts). We find that much of the decline in the number of school districts has resulted from: 1) the decline in the farm population and increase in population density, which has made it easier to take advantage of scale economies; 2) the growing importance of state aid, which reduces quality variation among districts within a state; and 3) the increase in the fraction of teachers that belong to the National Education Association teachers union, which may reflect increased political influence used to lower the costs of organizing.Several states have laws that require school district and county (or state) boundaries to coincide. In the last section of the paper we estimate the costs of these laws. First, we compare the predicted number of districts, using the regression results in the earlier section of the paper, to the actual number in these states. Then we estimate a demand equation that is used to generate the dollar amount of the cost due to diminished interjurisdictional competition.

Voter turnout and the benefits of voting

A model of voting behavior is developed that predicts that individuals vote if the absolute value of voting for or against a referendum exceeds the cost of voting. The results obtained from examining voting on city-county consolidation referenda and in New York state (1) provide support for the relatively untested prediction that turnout rises as the absolute value of the mean gains resulting from an electoral outcome increase and (2) augment the evidence that turnout rises as the probability of altering an electoral outcome increases and falls as the cost of voting rises.

Evidence on the Impact of State Government on Primary and Secondary Education and the Equity-Efficiency Trade-off

State governments may affect the productivity of primary and secondary education in two ways. First, various regulations imposed on local school districts are expected to make schools less efficient. Second, state efforts to reduce inequality in education spending make it more difficult for voters to increase school quality, which should lead to less voter monitoring of schools and thus less efficient schools. Our empirical analysis of state Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores from 1987 to 1992 provides evidence on both effects. The states revenue share, which captures state meddling in local decisions, has the expected negative impact on school efficiency. But our novel result is that state‐induced spending equalization also lowers average test scores but has had little if any effect on reducing the disparity in student achievement. These results bring into question policy efforts designed to shift education responsibilities from local governments to state and federal governments.

Compensating differentials in teachers' salaries

Abstract Using a sample of 1419 school districts from six states, this paper investigates the importance of compensating wage differentials in the teaching profession. Particular attention is paid to the role of locational amenities such as crime, climate, and the cost of living in the determination of teachers salaries. Evidence is produced supporting the hypothesis that nominal wages adjust, ceteris paribus, to geographical variation in the cost of living to keep real wages constant. Wages are also found to be quite responsive to changes in the climate.

The Influence of the Elderly on School Spending in a Median Voter Framework

How do the elderly influence school spending if they are a minority of the population? We estimate the determinants of school spending in a median voter model, comparing four assumptions about how the elderly influence the identity of the median voter. Using a county-level panel, we find that elderly preferences are best characterized by assuming all elderly or all elderly migrants vote with the poor. Having more elderly results in a median voter who is further down the communitys income distribution. This median voter is poorer, which lowers preferred school spending, and faces a lower tax price, which raises preferred school spending. The evidence suggests that the income effect is slightly larger than the price effect, so the elderly on net cause a very small drop in spending. Thus the widespread concern about the negative impact of population aging on school funding seems to be misplaced.

Voter Reaction to City-County Consolidation Referenda

T HERE have been few studies on voting behavior in which explicit predictions from economic theory have been tested. Two major reasons are the inability (1) to identify precisely the beneficiaries of alternative election outcomes and (2) to directly link the beneficiaries, when known, one to one with a turnout population, so that a usable sample can be obtained. One aspect of these problems that can be surmounted, and which is the subject of our investigation, is the urban-suburban conflict that has been so prevalent in recent years: city-county consolidation. The property tax structure of local government in the United States enables communities to expropriate wealth from their richer residents. Our model, which incorporates this feature of property taxation, predicts that the median voter in a wealthy (for example, suburban) community is made unambiguously worse off, ceteris paribus, from merger with a poorer (for example, urban) community and that it is highly likely that the median voter in the poor community is made better off from the merger. The percentage of those voters voting in favor of city-county consolidation is then predicted to be a positive function of the difference between the mean (median) family income of the residents in the proposed government and the mean (median) family income of the residents in the current government. In this paper we develop and test this proposition in a model which is couched in a theory of voter behavior.