Contact: Christian Buerger
Status/Collaborator Need: I need help with creating a school census including traditional public schools, private schools, and schools of choice for Indianapolis and school districts with an adjacent border to Indianapolis. On Trello Board under "Create a School Census for Indianapolis and its surrounding school districts" are the specifics.
Overview: To own a home, families participate in a competitive bidding process that is based on household preferences regarding housing and neighborhood characteristics in addition to their ability to pay. As a consequence, housing markets segregate families along dimensions such as wealth, race, ethnicity, and access to public services. An extensive body of literature has examined the link between school quality and residential location and documented that school quality, as a local public good, is capitalized into housing values. Further, studies have found that heterogeneous preferences for school quality and different abilities to pay for housing lead to residential sorting. School choice policies, such as charter schools and vouchers, weaken the link between residential location and school quality, affecting both housing prices and neighborhood composition. Therefore, this project investigates how the introduction and expansion of charter and private school choice programs influenced housing values and residential sorting in Indianapolis.
Project Description last Updated: 10/17/2022
Contact: Justin Ross (justross@indiana.edu)
Status/Collaborator Need: We essentially have all the data needed to do this one. Just would need someone to pull it together to run the analysis and check up on a fresh literature review.
Overview: States set limits on local government powers to tax and spend (TELs). One view is that this undermines the ability for local governments to creatively engage and run projects that could allow them to prosper. Another view is that 1) local governments will generally fail at such things, so preventing them from doing more will be beneficial; 2) TELs are credible constraints on how exploitive local governments can become, which will encourage private investment. I have the TEL policies by state, and we have or can obtain county level data on GDP, population, etc. We could
Project Description last updated: 9/1/2022
Contact: Denvil Duncan or John Stavik
Status: John has access to state-level payroll data. Immediate task for the collaborator is to review literature to confirm that I have not missed any papers focused on state-level civil servants, and check for interesting policy changes that would allow for a causal study.
Overview: I am hoping to replicate and extend a paper that studies pay gaps in the federal civil service. The wage-gap literature is very extensive, but it seems to me that John’s state-level offers an opportunity to explore the question at a level not yet studied (as far as i can tell). Starting point would be two fold. First, review literature to confirm that I have not missed any papers focused on state-level civil servants. Second, check for policy changes that would allow for a causal study. A descriptive paper would be a high-value-added product on its own. However, adding a casual element would be even better.
Project Description last updated: 9/2/2022