School leaders in four communities describe some approaches they are using to reduce school district spending or generate new revenues. Suggestions include finding alternative revenue sources; pursuing "pro bono" or in-kind services; adopting zero-base, programmatic budgeting; reducing support and custodial staff ratios; and applying technological…

Reports circulation and expenditure statistics for public libraries for 1980-90, based on a representative sample of 53 U.S. public libraries serving a population of over 25,000. Data include figures for adult circulation, juvenile circulation, salary expenditures, material expenditures, and circulation and expenditures per capita. (LRW)

Provides guidelines for building a consistent and reliable database of expenditures within an institution of higher education. Stresses the importance of involving key constituencies, including both data providers and data users, in decisions about building the data elements for such a database and the resulting campus cost studies. (DB)

If money truly does not matter, and disadvantage cannot be quantified in terms of valuable social or economic goods, then questions of justice become aridly academic. How are resources to be valued? Faulty research design skewed Eric Hanushek's results. More precisely designed studies are revealing relationships between school expenditures and…

Contains data on state library agencies in the 50 states and the District of Columbia, including these agencies' governance, services, collections, staff, and income and expenditures. Data are from the State Library Agency Survey, a cooperative effort of several government agencies, including the National Center for Education Statistics.…

An effective internal-control system can help school business administrators meet the challenges of accounting for student activity funds. Such a system should include appropriate policies and procedures, identification of key control points, self-assessments, audit trails, and internal and external audits. (MLH)

This annual construction report reveals that even as the overall economy continued to suffer, education construction spending reached record heights in 2001, and promises to remain robust through at least 2004. Includes several data tables and figures on spending, costs, and resource allocation, including regional differences. (EV)

Contains data on state library agencies, including these agencies' governance, staffing, income and expenditures, electronic services, and services to libraries. Data are from the State Library Agencies Survey. (Author/SLD)

Examines public library budgets by the population size served. Discusses total budgets, salary budgets, and materials budgets; funding and technology, including e-rate for Internet access and Internet filtering; and fundraising. (LRW)

Provides data on rates of participation in various types of nonparental care, average number of hours spent in care per week, and families' out-of-pocket expenses for child care. Includes differences by characteristics of children and their families. (Author)

Using longitudinal comparison data, shows that including socioeconomic status as a production function creates serious statistical problems that mask the significance of other school inputs (teacher education and experience, teacher salary, teacher-pupil ratio, and expenditure per pupil). Recommends corrective methodologies. (Contains 35…

Offers recent and longer-term evidence that serves as the basis of conflicting views on endowment spending, one advocating an increase and the other advocating a reduction. By documenting and clarifying the basis for each view, aims to help college endowment planners to make better-informed decisions and higher education planners to understand the…

Summarizes universe data on libraries in 2-year and 4-year degree-granting postsecondary institutions. Includes information about services, staff, collections, and expenditures. Data are from the Academic Libraries Survey of the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data survey. (SLD)

Using data from the U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey 1998, this study analyzes how much money different types of households spend for domestic services on "female" and "male" tasks. We test alternative hypotheses based on economic and sociological theories of gender differentiation. Contrary to arguments that marriage lowers the risk to one…

The determinants of expenditures on wedding celebrations by rural Indian families are examined. A status signaling model of wedding celebrations is developed where the size of the celebration signals the quality of the new groom's family and the enhanced social status of the bride's family.