Despite extensive public infrastructure spending, surprisingly little is known about its economic return. In this paper, we estimate the value of school facility investments using housing markets: standard models of local public goods imply that school districts should spend up to the point where marginal increases would have zero effect on local housing prices. Our research design isolates exogenous variation in investments by comparing school districts where referenda on bond issues targeted to fund capital expenditures passed and failed by narrow margins. We extend this traditional regression discontinuity approach to identify the dynamic treatment effects of bond authorization on local housing prices, student achievement, and district composition. Our results indicate that California school districts underinvest in school facilities: passing a referendum causes immediate, sizable increases in home prices, implying a willingness to pay on the part of marginal homebuyers of $1.50 or more for each $1 of capital spending. These effects do not appear to be driven by changes in the income or racial composition of homeowners, and the impact on test scores appears to explain only a small portion of the total housing price effect. This paper estimates the impact of investments in school facilities using the housing market. We draw on the unique characteristics of California's system of school finance, comparing districts in which school bond referenda passed or failed by narrow margins. We extend the traditional regression discontinuity (RD) design to account for the dynamic nature of bond referenda: the probability of future proposals depends on the outcomes of past elections. Using our "dynamic RD" estimator, we first show that bond funds stick exclusively in the capital account, with no effect on current expenditures or other revenues. We can thus interpret the effect of referendum passage as reflecting the impact of improvements in the quality of school facilities. We find that passing a referendum causes immediate, sizable increases in home prices, implying a willingness-to-pay on the part of marginal homebuyers of $1.50 or more for each dollar per pupil of facility spending. These effects do not appear to be driven by changes in the income or racial composition of homeowners. While we find suggestive evidence that bond passage leads to increases in student test scores, this effect cannot explain more than a small portion of the housing price effect, indicating that bond passage leads to improvements in other dimensions of school output (e.g., safety) that may be not captured by test scores. Disciplines Economics | Real Estate

This paper reviews the literature on poverty dynamics in the United States. It surveys the most prevalent data, theories, and methods used to answer three key questions: How likely are people to enter, exit, and reenter poverty? How long do people remain in poverty? And what events are associated with entering and exiting poverty? The paper then analyzes the combined findings of the literature, discussing overarching patterns of poverty dynamics, differences among demographic groups, and how poverty probabilities, duration, and events have changed over time. We conclude with a discussion of the policy implications of these findings and avenues for future research.

A lengthy literature estimating the returns to education has largely ignored the for-profit sector. In this paper, we estimate the earnings gains to for-profit college attendance using restricted-access data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97). Using an individual fixed effects estimation strategy that allows us to control for time-invariant unobservable characteristics of students, we find that students who enroll in associate's degree programs in for-profit colleges experience earnings gains of about 10 percent relative to high school graduates with no college degree, conditional on employment. Since associate's degree students attend for an average of 2.6 years, this translates to a 4 percent return per year of education in a for-profit college, slightly lower than estimates of returns for other sectors found in the literature.

This study assesses the impact of an increase in funding for public community colleges on the market for two-year college education, considering both the effect on community college enrollments and on the number of proprietary schools in a market. I draw on a new administrative dataset of for-profit colleges in California and votes on local community college bond referenda to implement a unique regression discontinuity design. The results suggest that bond passage diverts students from the private to the public sector and causes a corresponding decline in the number of proprietary schools in the market. (JEL H75, I22, I23)

We draw on population-level administrative data from the U.S. Department of Education and the Internal Revenue Service to quantify the impact of for-profit college attendance on the employment and earnings of over one million students. Using a matched comparison group difference-in-differences design, we find that certificate-seeking students in for-profit institutions are 1.5 percentage points less likely to be employed and, conditional on employment, have 11 percent lower earnings after attendance than students in public institutions. These results hold for both men and women and for seven of the top ten fields of study. We find that earnings and employment outcomes are particularly poor for students attending for-profit colleges that offer the majority of their courses online and for multicampus chains. We find that for-profit students experience small, statistically insignificant gains in annual earnings after attendance compared to a matched control group of young individuals who do not attend college. A back-of-the-envelope comparison of these earnings gains to average debt burdens suggests that for-profit certificate programs do not pay off for the average student.