TY - JOUR AU - Go,Sun AU - Lindert,Peter H. TI - The Curious Dawn of American Public Schools JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 13335 PY - 2007 Y2 - August 2007 DO - 10.3386/w13335 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13335 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13335.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Sun Go 84 Heukseok-ro School of Economics Chung-Ang University Dongjak-gu Seoul 06974 Korea Tel: 8228205485 Fax: 8228129718 E-Mail: sungo@cau.ac.kr Peter H. Lindert Department of Economics University of California, Davis Davis, CA 95616 Tel: 530/752-1983 Fax: 530/752-5611 E-Mail: phlindert@ucdavis.edu AB - Three factors help to explain why school enrollments in the Northern United States were higher than those in the South and in most of Europe by 1850. One was affordability: the northern states had higher real incomes, cheaper teachers, and greater local tax support. The second was the greater autonomy of local governments. The third was the greater diffusion of voting power among the citizenry in much of the North, especially in rural communities. The distribution of local political voice appears to be a robust predictor of tax support and enrollments, both within and between regions. ER -