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Designed to reach a wide audience of scholars and policymakers, the "Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs" is an annual series that serves as a forum for cutting-edge, accessible research on urban policy. The editors seek to integrate broader research into the policy discussion by bringing urban studies scholars together with economists and researchers studying subjects with important urban implications. "Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs" presents new research on urban economics to a broad audience of interested policy analysts and researchers. The papers and comments contained in this volume, the seventh in the series, were presented at a December 8-9, 2005, conference at the Brookings Institution. The papers treat a range of issues examined by contemporary urban economists, including the effects of population growth and changing income inequality on neighborhood segregation, the economic gains from creating express lanes and charging congestion prices on busy expressways, recent trends in the school achievement gap between white and black youngsters, the impact of neighborhood poverty on barriers to employment, the potential benefits of restructuring local property taxes, and the effects of land use restrictions and jurisdictional fragmentation on sprawl and the price of housing. In this issue, six papers on urban economics address a wide range of issues: (1) Metropolitan Growth, Inequality, and Neighborhood Segregation by Income (Tara Watson); (2) Differentiated Road Pricing, Express Lanes, and Carpools: Exploiting Heterogeneous Preferences in Policy Design (Kenneth A. Small, Clifford Winston, and KIA Yarn); (3) Understanding Trends in the Black-White Achievement Gaps during the First Years of School (Richard J. Mundane, John B. Willetta, Kristen L. Bub, and Kathleen McCartney); (4) Neighborhood Effects on Barriers to Employment: Results from a Randomized Housing Mobility Experiment in Baltimore (Kristin Tourney, Susan Clamped-Lundquist, Kathryn Edin, Jeffrey R. Kline, and Greg J. Duncan); (5) Effects of Property Taxation on Development Timing and Density: Policy Perspective (Richard Anett); and (6) Sprawl and Jurisdictional Fragmentation (Edwin S. Mills).

Even when studying the same measures of school performance, some educational researchers conclude that greater spending is useful in promoting student progress; others find little evidence that extra spending produces meaningful improvement in student performance. The studies in this book focus on two measures of educational effectiveness. Half examine the effect of school spending on the academic achievement of youngsters while they are in school. The other half assess the impact of school resources on students' earnings after their formal schooling has ended. About half of the papers find no persuasive evidence that increased spending produces consistent gains, either in student achievement or in adult earnings. Two sets of authors conclude that added spending improves student outcomes. The last two groups of authors argue that variations in the level of school spending are less important than effective organization of school resources in determining whether spending differences have important consequences for student outcomes. Chapters include the following: (1) "Introduction and Summary" (Gary Burtless); (2) "School Resources and Student Performance" (Eric A. Hanushek); (3) "Have Times Changed? The Relation between School Resources and Student Performance" (Larry V. Hedges and Rob Greenwald); (4) "Evidence from Fifteen Schools in Austin, Texas" (Richard J. Murnane and Frank Levy); (5) "Labor Market Effects of School Quality: Theory and Evidence" (David Card and Alan B. Krueger); (6) "Is There a Link between School Inputs and Earnings? Fresh Scrutiny of an Old Literature" (Julian R. Betts); and (7) "Does Measured School Quality Really Matter? An Examination of the Earnings-Quality Relationship" (James Heckman, Anne Layne-Farrar, and Petra Todd). Sixty-five tables, 20 figures, and an index are included. References accompany each chapter. (LMI)