Three essays in public economics

The three chapters of my dissertation consider various aspects of public service provision. Chapter one examines a state level equilibrium model of teacher supply. Educational policy analysts have suggested that alternative routes of teacher certification will increase the teacher supply by lowering the costs (both time and pecuniary costs) of becoming a teacher. The results of this paper provide evidence that the existence of certain types of alternative certification routes will increase the supply of teachers in a state and that routes that reduce the costs of becoming a teacher the most are more effective in raising teacher supply. Emergency teaching permits appear to increase teacher supply in the short term more than any other policy.;The increasing number of large, inexpensive bookstores may crowd out public library use. No empirical research has been done on the effect large bookstores have had on libraries. Using probit and multinomial logit estimation procedures, the second chapter estimates the impact of large bookstores on the probability that a household uses a public library, finding that large bookstores lead people to use various public library services less. Large bookstores did not appear to have a negative effect on household use of libraries for most children's programming.;Local public services often must compete for funding from their providing governments. Public libraries have also had to endure the rise of large bookstores offering similar services. This may have motivated libraries to behave in a more cost efficient manner. Alternatively, monitoring of libraries may have decreased as patrons shift from library use to bookstore use, increasing inefficiency. In the final chapter of this dissertation a stochastic cost frontier and the determinants of cost inefficiency are estimated using a one-step maximum likelihood technique. The results suggest that libraries operate at roughly 44% greater costs than is efficient. Inefficiency is found to be largely due to the size of the population served, the source of funding, and improper staffing ratios. Private sector competition was found to slightly increase library cost inefficiency, consistent with a decrease in monitoring.