Now in its 4th edition, State and Local Public Finance provides a comprehensive and sophisticated analysis of state and local government public finance practices and issues, using the basic tools of economics. For this new edition, there is a focus on the most important services provided in the state-local sector: education, health and welfare, public safety, and transportation. This textbook provides an examination and analysis of public finance practices and problems in a federal fiscal system, focusing on the fiscal behaviour and policies of state and local governments. The author presents detailed descriptions of significant institutions. Modern economic theory is applied to examine the way these institutions are used to produce and finance services, and to provide evaluation of alternative policies. Although the emphasis is on U.S. institutions and issues, much of the economic analysis can be applied to any federal system or to fiscal decentralization. This fully revised new edition sees updates throughout to data, topics, and applications. The Headlines and Applications sections reflect the most current policy issues affecting state and local governments. These include the effects of the Great Recession on state and local governments, changes in the tax treatment of internet purchases, the Affordable Care Act and implications for Medicaid spending by state governments, demographic changes and the implications for state-local finances, the implications of changes in automobile technology for transportation financing, and the potential for increased gambling activity. This text will continue to be invaluable reading for those who study public finance, local government finance, urban economics and public policy and public administration.

This paper develops a simple model of human capital accumulation and community formation by heterogeneous families, which provides an integrated framework for analyzing the local determinants of inequality and growth. Five main conclusions emerge. First, minor differences in education technologies, preferences, or wealth can lead to a high degree of stratification. Imperfect capital markets are not necessary, but will compound these other sources. Second, stratification makes inequality in education and income more persistent across generations. Whether or not the same is true of inequality in total wealth depends on the ability of the rich to appropriate the rents created by their secession. Third, the polarization of urban areas resulting from individual residential decisions can be quite inefficient, both from the point of view of aggregate growth and in the Pareto sense, especially in the long run. Fourth, when state-wide equalization of school expenditures is insufficient to reduce stratification, it may improve educational achievement in poor communities much less than it lowers it in richer communities; thus average academic performance and income growth both fall. Yet it may still be possible for education policy to improve both equity and efficiency. Fifth, because of the cumulative nature of the stratification process, it is likely to be much harder to reverse once it has run its course than to arrest it at an early stage.

Many states have or are considering implementing school finance reforms aimed at lessening inequality in the provision of public education across communities. These reforms will tend to have complicated aggregate effects on income distribution, intergenerational income mobility, and welfare. In order to analyze the potential effects of such reforms, this paper constructs a dynamic general equilibrium model of public education provision, calibrates it using US data, and examines the quantitative effects of a major school finance reform. The policy reform examined is a change from a system of pure local finance to one in which all funding is done at the federal level and expenditures per student are equal across communities. We find that this policy increases average income and total spending on education as a fraction of income. Moreover, there are large welfare gains associated with this policy; steady-state welfare increases by 3.2% of steady-state income.

R. H. Coase Duncan Black was a close and dear friend. A man of great simplicity, un worldly, modest, diffident, with no pretensions, he was devoted to scholarship. In his single-minded search for the truth, he is an example to us all. Black's first degree at the University of Glasgow was in mathematics and physics. Mathematics as taught at Glasgow seems to have been designed for engineers and did not excite him and he switched to economics, which he found more congenial. But it was not in a lecture in economics but in one on politics that he found his star. One lecturer, A. K. White, discussed the possibility of constructing a pure science of politics. This question caught his imagination, perhaps because of his earlier training in physics, and it came to absorb his thoughts for the rest of his life. But almost certainly nothing would have come of it were it not for his appointment to the newly formed Dundee School of Economics where the rest of the. teaching staff came from the London School of Economics. At Glasgow, economics, as in the time of Adam Smith, was linked with moral philosophy. At Dundee, Black was introduced to the analytical x The Theory o/Committees and Elections approach dominant at the London School of Economics. This gave him the approach he used in his attempt to construct a pure science of politics.