Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
Outsourcing And The Pupil Transportation Industry In Minnesota: An Economic Evaluation, Conrad Yelsong Puozaa
Outsourcing And The Pupil Transportation Industry In Minnesota: An Economic Evaluation, Conrad Yelsong Puozaa
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Private participation in the provision of public services is often promoted as a means to reducing production costs in the public sector. In this study, I test this result using a twelve-year panel dataset of 343 public school districts in Minnesota. The voting behavior of residents in the state’s House elections and school districts’ prior experience with contractors are used as instruments to control for the endogenous decision to outsource. The first stage results from fixed-effects two stage least squares (2SLS) regression show that the two instruments, population density and the number of school days increase the likelihood of outsourcing …
School Quality Capitalization Into Housing Prices In Minnesota And Pennsylvania, Jonathan Taylor Smith
School Quality Capitalization Into Housing Prices In Minnesota And Pennsylvania, Jonathan Taylor Smith
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation develops and estimates a spatial autoregressive with autoregressive errors model of housing prices that accounts for both the endogeneity of spatially-lagged housing prices and local school quality measured by performance on state standardized tests. Two datasets are used from Boyertown, PA and Minneapolis, MN. Homes are spatially weighted against each other using a k nearest-neighbor approach. School quality is thought to be endogenous because unobserved neighborhood amenities in the error term of a hedonic regression are very likely positively correlated with local elementary, middle, and high school quality. Following previous literature, the optimal instrument matrix is constructed as …