Public Finance Quarterly 

About: Public Finance Quarterly is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Indirect tax & Tax reform. It has an ISSN identifier of 0048-5853. Over the lifetime, 851 publications have been published receiving 8226 citations.

Approaches To the Analysis of Government Expenditure Growth

Abstract: The article surveys the literature on public expenditure growth, and makes some suggestions for possible future developments. At the theoretical level, it is argued that public choice and associate...

Mimicking of Local Tax Burdens Among Neighboring Counties

Abstract: This article contributes to the small literature on the determination of local taxes by testing hypotheses about whether local officials consider the tax burdens of neigh boring counties when making their own decisions about taxes on residents. Based on data for large U.S. counties, evidence of tax mimicking appears first in compar isons of the degree of clustering of tax burdens among neighboring counties within metropolitan areas to that among nonneighboring counties within states. In addition, regression equations based on both 1978 and 1985 data confirm the presence of tax mimicking for total local tax burdens and for property tax burdens, but not for sales tax burdens.

On the Excess Burden of Tax Evasion

Abstract: This paper discusses tax evasion. Specifically, the viewpoint that tax evasion benefits society is questioned and proven not to be entirely true. A simple model of tax evasion is presented and it is concluded that: 1) tax evasion is a function of inter alia the marginal tax rate only if the probability of being caught is a function of undeclared income; and 2) that tax evasion introduces uncertainty which causes a utility loss. An example is presented showing that the excess burden of tax evasion and the income tax are sometimes additive. Therefore, ignoring the excess burden of tax evasion will usually lead to underestimation of the total excess burden of a tax.

Measuring School District Performance

Abstract: This article provides a method of measuring performance in the public sector, specifically performance of school districts. The technique is closely related to the family of Farrell type efficiency measures as well as data envelopment analysis (DEA). It also can be viewed as a generalization of earlier work on educational production functions. The approach gauges performance relative to the best practice frontier constructed from enveloping observed data points. It is nonparametric, i.e., no parametric functional form is imposed on the data, and the approach readily admits multiple goals or outputs. By way of illustration we apply this approach to a sample of Missouri school districts for the 1985-1986 school year. In order to reduce the impact of outliers we employ jackknifing techniques.

Measuring Efficiency in Educational Production

Abstract: An attempt is made to explore the production set for educational achievement for both “efficient” and “inefficient” schools. The inefficient or average production relationship is obtained by estimating a reduced-form equation for all schools among a sample drawn from a large Eastern city. The efficient set is derived by using a linear programming approach to yield coefficients for those schools that show the largest student achievement output relative to their resource inputs. A comparison of the two sets of technical coefficients suggests that the relative marginal products are probably different. Because of such differences, the optimal combination of inputs for producing educational achievement relative to a given budget constraint will probably vary between achievement-efficient and inefficient schools, and may even vary from school to school. The result is that the use of such production-function estimates for attempting to improve the efficiency of the educational sector may have far less utility th...