Selection Into Public Service: Evidence from School Board Elections
In this paper, we show that the election of a new school board member causes home values in their neighborhood to rise. This effect is identified using narrowly-decided contests and is driven by members with non-Democratic political affiliations. We do not find corresponding evidence for improvements in local school productivity, but show that neighborhood public schools of non-Democratic board members also shift to serving fewer minority students through attendance zone adjustments. In contrast, we detect no differential changes when comparing neighborhood or scholastic outcomes between winning and losing Democratic school board candidates.
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