Selection Into Public Service: Evidence from School Board Elections

Stephen B. Billings is an associate professor of finance at the Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado Boulder. Hugh Macartney is a principal economist at Amazon. Geunyong Park (park.geunyong@nus.edu.sg) is an assistant professor at the NUS Business School, National University of Singapore. John D. Singleton is an associate professor of economics at the University of Rochester and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. We thank Leah Boustan, Jonathan Guryan, Jacob Krimmel, and participants at the University of Rochester, UNLV, the 2020 Urban Economics Association, and the 2021 European Urban Economics Association meetings for helpful comments and discussions. The authors declare that they have no other relevant or material financial interests that relate to the research described in this paper. All remaining errors are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Data Availability Statement: This paper draws on five data sources, three of which are publicly available and two of which are restricted. (1) School board election results are publicly available from the North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) at https://www.ncsbe.gov. (2) Voter registration annual snapshots for 2005–2018 are publicly distributed by NCSBE at https://www.ncsbe.gov/results-data/voter-registration-data. (3) Census block-group demographic, income, and racial-composition tabulations from the five-year American Community Survey for 2010–2014 are publicly available through IPUMS NHGIS at https://www.nhgis.org. (4) The Zillow Transaction and Assessment Dataset (ZTRAX) was provided under a research-use agreement that has since been discontinued; researchers interested in obtaining historical ZTRAX extracts should consult Zillow Research at https://www.zillow.com/research/ztrax. The results and opinions are those of the authors and do not reflect the position of Zillow Group. (5) Confidential administrative records on students, teachers, and schools were provided under restricted-data agreement by the North Carolina Education Research Data Center (NCERDC); access may be requested by filing a research application with NCERDC, hosted at the Duke University Center for Child and Family Policy (https://childandfamilypolicy.duke.edu). A fuller description of the data sources, sample-construction steps, and access procedures is provided in the Data Appendix at the start of the Online Appendix.

• February 24, 2022
• September 16, 2025