IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/29791.html

Selection Into Public Service: Evidence from School Board Elections

Author

Listed:
  • Stephen B. Billings
  • Hugh Macartney
  • Geunyong Park
  • John D. Singleton

Abstract

In this paper, we use narrowly-decided elections and housing transactions data to test for private returns from public office in the context of school boards in the U.S. We find no detectable effect of election to the school board on home prices in the neighborhoods of winning candidates. Stratifying by political affiliation reveals that homes appreciate in winning Republicans' neighborhoods, but the estimate is not statistically robust. We do not find corresponding evidence for improvements in local school productivity, but we show that neighborhood public schools of Republican members also shift to serving more white students through attendance zone adjustments.

Suggested Citation

  • Stephen B. Billings & Hugh Macartney & Geunyong Park & John D. Singleton, 2022. "Selection Into Public Service: Evidence from School Board Elections," NBER Working Papers 29791, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29791
    Note: CH ED LS PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w29791.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Alvin Christian & Brian Jacob & John D. Singleton, 2022. "Assessing School District Decision-Making: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic," NBER Working Papers 30520, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Jones, Daniel B. & Walsh, Randall & Zeng, Jiangnan, 2025. "The elected official next door," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 111(C).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • H75 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - State and Local Government: Health, Education, and Welfare
    • I24 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Education and Inequality

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29791. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.