Essays on the effectiveness of public school spending and simultaneous equation quantile regression

The first two essays of this dissertation examine the relationship between spending and the proportion of students who go on to higher education from public school districts. The first essay examines this relationship for the conditional mean school district using statewide school district refinancing in Kansas. The second essay examines this relationship in a district that is significantly below the conditional mean by studying the effect of a large spending increase in Kansas City, Mo. The combined results of these essays reinforce the common sense notion that increased spending can have a positive economic impact, but only when the institutions of the school district are able to efficiently employ the additional resources.;The final essay suggests a robust alternative to Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) for two equations. This simultaneous equation median regression estimator is investigated using Monte Carlo simulations. Simulation results support the conjecture that this estimator is unbiased, Normally distributed, and more efficient than single equation median regression. In cases of t 3 and heteroskedastic errors, it is also more efficient than SUR. These conjectures are further supported with an empirical example using data from the second essay.