Publications

This report, underwritten and published by the Kansas Policy Institute, contemplates several forward-looking scenarios for the Kansas budget (and also provides a history of select trends).
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This report surveys the structure of the broadband internet industry in Kansas and discusses the dynamics of the industry in the context of national trends.
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This report uses hypothetical property types to make inter-state and intra-state property tax burden comparisons for select Kansas cities.
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This report discusses various issues associated with economic research related to charter schools, with a general application to Kansas and surrounding states.
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This report, published by the Kansas Policy Institute, attempts to quantify, in comparison with other states, the levels and growth rates of people employed in the service of the Kansas K-12 public school system. View Publication

This report, underwritten and published by Kansas, Inc., offers a critical appraisal of certain elements of Kansas economic development policy. It also offers recommendations for improvement.View Publication

This report discusses the reasons that Medicaid tends to offer such poor service and provides a framework for how Kansas can reform its Medicaid program to offer higher quality at lower cost. The report also references reforms in the Florida Medicaid system. View Publication

This report explores the economic issues related to a particular tax reform idea: replacing all state-level taxes in Kansas with a single tax. The single tax in this case is a comprehensive retail sales tax. View Publication

This report, underwritten and published by Kansas, Inc., explores general economic principles and specific Kansas history with regard to technology-based economic development. It also offers recommendations for improvement. View Publication

This report details why the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System is bankrupt under current operating assumptions. It also suggests reasons why the system should transform from a defined-benefit arrangement to a defined-contribution arrangement (like the one used by the Kansas Board of Regents). View Publication

This document provides an executive summary, from a Kansas perspective, of the Center's report titled "The County-to-County Migration of Taxpayers and their Incomes, 1995-2006." View Publication

The report, underwritten and published by Kansas, Inc., documents and analyzes the growth trends and dynamic compositional changes related to manufacturing that have taken place in Kansas. View Publication

This study, underwritten and published by the Flint Hills Center for Public Policy, provides an argument and conceptual design for a property tax system that replaces the age-old ad valorem system. View Publication

This report evaluates the impact of public school funding on student performance in Kansas. It finds no statistically significant relationship between per-student funding and test scores. It finds weak evidence of a positive relationship between per-student funding and graduation rates. View Publication

This brief discusses an income tax procedure known as "expensing." It explains how it works and why implementing it would make the Kansas tax code more investment-friendly. View Publication

This report provides detailed analysis of the annual county-to-county migration patterns of taxpayers (IRS filers) in Kansas. The report is supplemented by a spreadsheet file that provides detailed information for each of the 105 counties in Kansas. Please read the "Description" tab of the spreadsheet to understand how to find the information you want. View Publication

This article, published in the spring 2006 issue of the Kansas Policy Review, evaluates economic growth and productivity trends among the Plains states and the different regions of Kansas. View Publication

This study, underwritten and published by Kansas, Inc., uses hypothetical homestead, commercial, and industrial properties to accurately compare property tax burdens across 118 Kansas localities, over decade-by-decade intervals, from 1975 to 2005. View Publication

This report highlights key findings from a set of seven companion reports that investigate long-term economic trends in Kansas from different perspectives. The Center produced the seven different reports for Kansas, Inc. View Publication

Long-Term Economic Trends in the Regions of Kansas, 1969-2003

Long-Term Industry Trends in the Regions of Kansas, 1969-2000: Part I - An Industry Focus

Long-Term Industry Trends in the Regions of Kansas, 1969-2000: Part II - A Regional Focus

Economic Trends Along the Kansas-Nebraska Border, 1969-2003

Economic Trends Along the Kansas-Missouri Border, 1969-2003

Economic Trends Along the Kansas-Oklahoma Border, 1969-2003

Economic Trends Along the Kansas-Colorado Border, 1969-2003

This brief supplements the tables in the Center's report entitled Exaggerated Tales of Rural Economic Decline with tables that contain Kansas-specific information on changes in population, employment, and income, 1970 - 2000.View Publication

This report provides a situation analysis of the Kansas economy. It highlights the historic trends of key economic variables that both identify and relate to poor productivity growth in Kansas. View Publication

This brief reviews the economic evidence with regard rural economic development and how the evidence may relate to Kansas. View Publication

This brief explains how reports of rural economic decline are often exaggerated due to the way in which government statisticians define "rural." It also explains the economic development importance of proximity to population centers. View Publication

This report, published by the American Legislative Exchange Council, surveys non-pension public employee retirement benefit plans (so-called Other Post Employment Benefit plans) in a sample of states. The report makes a case for shifting from a defined-benefit to a defined-contribution approach for funding such benefits as a way to help legislators budget in a manner that limits unexpected liabilities for future taxpayers. View Publication

This report, published by the American Legislative Exchange Council, analyzes state defined-benefit pension plans in light of the 2007 recession. It uses Colorado and Kansas as case studies. It recommends that states begin shifting their defined-benefit plans to defined-contribution plans. View Publication

This report evaluates the patterns and determinants of year-to-year migration patterns of taxpayers among all U.S. counties in the 48 contiguous states. It also provides a review of other migration-related studies.View Publication

Based on a review of select Midwestern states, public decision makers rarely analyze road projects as investments. The prioritization of transportation funds can improve substantially if decision makers established rigorous and reliable benefit-cost analysis protocols. This report offers an introduction to the issues and procedures involved. View Publication

This report offers a primer on the complicated relationship among three key components of the economic development process. Readers will benefit from the expansive definition of the term “entrepreneurship.” View Publication

This report offers a framework for understanding the entrepreneurial process and assesses the academic evidence regarding the array of policies used to stimulate entrepreneurship. View Publication

The purpose of this report is to foster a broad and general understanding of the relationship between the establishment of biotechnology centers and economic development at the state level, and to consider whether a state biotechnology center is a critical infrastructural element of a state’s overall economic development strategy. The evidence is not conclusive that a state biotechnology center is the most efficient way for a state to stimulate its biotechnology industry. View Publication

This report articulates a set of economic principles to assist policymakers in their deliberations on the issue of deregulation in telecommunications markets. The key question confronting policymakers concerns when the discipline imposed by competition can substitute for the discipline imposed by regulation. The complexity of this question is exacerbated by the technological dynamics of the industry. It is critical that any test for deregulation be structured and dutifully applied in a manner that promotes consumer welfare rather than the welfare of individual competitors. The risk is that an improperly designed test for deregulation will serve anti-competitive rather than pro-competitive ends. View Publication

This report explains how the definition of income adopted for the income tax system in the United States (at both the federal and state levels) imposes an inherent double tax on the process of saving, which impedes economic growth and development. Policy makers can eliminate the growth impediment—and simultaneously simplify the administration of income tax systems—by adopting an alternate economic definition of income. View Publication

This report measures the impact of high-speed Internet access on local economic growth. The results suggest that high-speed Internet access increases growth in earnings per worker, aggregate earnings and the number of firms, but it lowers the rate of growth of employment. All of these effects were larger in less densely populated areas, suggesting that rural areas do benefit disproportionately from high-speed internet access. View Publication

This report examines the link between state economic growth and the most prominent business climate indexes that have been published over the past two decades. View Publication

This report provides a review and synthesis of the many economic studies that have attempted to assess whether public highway expenditures have resulted in improved economic grow. On balance, over the past three decades, the evidence indicates that such expenditures re-organize patterns of regional commerce rather than contribute to net new growth. One can find localized exceptions to this general finding. View Publication

Biotech is all the rage in professional economic development circles these days. Forty-one states have created policy initiatives to develop biotechnology into an engine of state economic growth. This report is a primer on the biotech "industry" and the complex market interactions associated with creating successful biotechnologies. View Publication

This report explains how frequent stories of rural economic decline in the United States have been exaggerated because of consistent measurement error on the part of researchers. Such error misinforms the policy-making process. For a related analysis with Kansas-specific data, please see Economic Change in Kansas Counties: A Data Supplement to "Exaggerated Tales of Rural Economic Decline" and Economic Change in Kansas Counties: A Data Supplement to "Exaggerated Tales of Rural Economic Decline and The Growth of Cities and Rural Economic Development." View Publication