Comments on, "Public school finance and urban school policy: General versus partial equilibrium analysis"

In “Public School Finance and Urban School Policy,” Thomas Nechyba summarizes his research using computational models to estimate the impact of policies on schooling and residential location decisions. Perhaps because of the fixed costs of developing sufficiently complex and accurate models, computational models are rarely used for educational policy analysis, even though they have the potential to greatly enrich our understanding of policy dynamics and our ability to predict the impact of policy choices. Nechyba’s work stands out because it applies such models to estimate conditions under a variety of policy alternatives. His framework assumes that families’ utility is a function of house quality, private consumption, and school quality, which is itself a function of per pupil spending and average peer inputs.