5 July 2017
Increasing the tax advantage of municipal bonds by 3 percentage points lowers mean borrowing costs by 9 to10 percent, according to
Daniel Garrett,
Andrey Ordin,
James W. Roberts, and
Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato. They find that larger tax incentives draw more bidders to bond auctions, thereby generating greater-than-unity pass-through.
3 July 2017
In a study of school reforms under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act,
Sade Bonilla and
Thomas Dee find that the state of Kentucky’s grouping of traditionally low-performing subgroups into an umbrella group may have catalyzed broader whole-school reforms. The Kentucky reforms raised math achievement of the targeted groups by 17 percent and reading achievement by 9 percent.
30 June 2017
Greater pre-deal network overlap increases the likelihood that two banks will merge as well as the gain in the acquirer and acquired bank’s combined market value at the announcement of the merger. Overlap is also associated with larger labor cost reductions and loan quality improvements, a study by
Ross Levine,
Chen Lin, and
Zigan Wang finds.