We explore how teachers unions affect education production by comparing outcomes between districts allocating new tax revenue amidst collective bargaining negotiations and districts allocating tax revenue well before. Districts facing union pressure …
Over the past half-century, court-ordered increases in public school spending dramatically changed the level and distribution of school resources in the United States. Recent evidence from surveys suggests that school finance reforms improved students’ short- and long-run outcomes. However, the policy implications remain unclear because, although observed effects are significantly different from zero, we do not know whether the benefits exceed the costs, or whether the internal rate of return exceeds benchmark interest rates.
In this paper, we provide new evidence on the distribution of claims in the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program across employers and industries. We also relate SSDI claims to employer and employee wage premiums and discuss implications for measures of inequality. Our research makes use of the universe of individual tax returns for the period 2000-2018, which allows to develop measures of the incidence of SSDI claims for all U.