State aid programs for equalizing spending across local school districts: does the structure of the program matter, or only it’s size?

This paper provides interesting insights into an important causal mechanism underlying Murray, Evans and Schwab’s (Am. Econ. Rev. 88(4):789–812, 1998) finding that court mandated reforms result in less inequality in spending per pupil levels across rich and poor school districts within a state. Treating the choice of an education program’s structure as endogenous, following the analysis of Leyden (Public Finance/Finances Publiques 47:229–247, 1992; Public Choice 115(1–2):83–107, 2003), yields empirical results suggesting that court mandated reforms increase the likelihood that a program’s structure will include a price effect and that the inclusion of a price effect in turn results in a decrease in spending inequality.     

Adaptive Management for Oil and Gas Development on Public Lands: An Innovative Approach to Resource Protection,or Symbolic Placation of Public Interests?

Energy development on public lands in the intermountain west is often contentious due to concerns over detrimental impacts to wildlife. To mitigate harm to ungulates and other species, federal agencies often utilize adaptive management, a structured decision‐making framework predicated on “learning while doing.” But in the context of recent energy development, does adaptive management represent an innovative approach to conservation, or is it a largely symbolic policy used to contain the scope of conflict? This article, rooted in the agenda‐setting literature, applies Sarah Pralle's (2006) framework to strategies of conflict containment used by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and industry in three contentious energy development projects in Wyoming. The findings indicate that the BLM's use of adaptive management can be understood as a strategy for conflict containment, rather than as a substantive policy change in public lands oil and gas development.