Bücher der Reihe Urban Institute Press

Perhaps the most important quality of a tax system is that citizens consider it fair. Yet agreement on what a just tax would look like is one of the most difficult questions in economics. This book advances knowledge considerably on this controversial topic by providing a variety of new perspectives culled from economics, law, history, and religion.

C. Eugene Steuerle, one of the country's most influential economists, offers an insider's look at tax policy based on a quarter century of working with officials of all political stripes. Steuerle outlines the principles of taxation and the early postwar period before proceeding to the tax policy battles that began with the Reagan revolution and continue today. Those expecting a simple story of triumph and defeat may be surprised. Rather than moving toward consensus and progress, tax policy history has been messy, repetitive, and often rancorous. Yet evolution-and even revolution-do occur. The second edition has been updated with a look at tax policy during the George W. Bush presidency.

Educational Economics: Where Do School Funds Go? examines education finance from the school''s vantage point, explaining how the varied funding streams can prevent schools from delivering academic services that mesh with their stated priorities. As government budgets shrink, linking expenditures to student outcomes will be imperative. Educational Economics offers concrete prescriptions for reform.

Juvenile justice officials across the United States are embracing a new method of dealing with adolescent substance abuse. Importing a popular innovation from adult courts, state and local governments have started hundreds of specialized drug courts to provide judicial supervision and coordinate substance abuse treatment for drug-involved juveniles. The number of youth affected by these new courts is relatively small, but the programs are spreading rapidly and their presence is changing how practitioners and policymakers think about adolescent drug use. Despite the increasing popularity of juvenile drug courts, researchers have only begun to test whether they stop or reduce teen substance abuse more effectively than other programs. Juvenile Drug Courts and Teen Substance Abuse is the first book to examine the ideas behind juvenile drug courts and explore their history and popularity. The editors have assembled top justice policy experts to assess the evidence supporting juvenile drug courts and to guide the next generation of evaluation research. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the role of the juvenile justice system in addressing teen drug problems.

Long before reinventing government came into vogue, the Urban Institute pioneered methods for government and human services agencies to measure the performance of their programs. This comprehensive guidebook synthesizes more than two decades of Harry Hatry's groundbreaking work. It covers every component of the performance measurement process, from identifying the program's mission, objectives, customers, and trackable outcomes to finding the best indicators for each outcome, the sources of data, and how to collect them. Hatry explains how to select indicator breakouts and benchmarks for comparison to actual values, and describes numerous uses for performance information. Since the publication of the first edition in 1999, the use of performance measurement has exploded at all levels of U.S. government, in nonprofit agencies, and around the world. The new edition has been revised and expanded to address recent developments in the field, including the increased availability of computer technology in collecting and presenting information, the movement to use outcome data to improve services, and the quality control issues that have emerged as data collection has increased. It is an indispensable handbook for newcomers and an important resource for experienced managers looking to improve their use of outcome data.

The history of Americäs tax system can be written largely as a history of Americäs wars. During World War II, Americans were urged to ration food, raise money, and accept higher taxes. After September 11, we were given tax cuts and asked to shop. Has the United States broken a noble tradition of fiscal sacrifice with the current, unprecedented wartime tax cuts, or are they the mark of new economic, and social forces at work? War and Taxes weighs the question by considering six conflicts that span the American Revolution to the present war in Iraq.

As our justice system has embarked upon one of our time's greatest social experiments¿responding to crime by expanding prisons¿we have forgotten the iron law of imprisonment: they all come back. In 2002, more than 630,000 individuals left federal and state prisons. Thirty years ago, only 150,000 did. In the intense political debate over America's punishment policies, the impact of these returning prisoners on families and communities has been largely overlooked. In But They All Come Back, Jeremy Travis continues his pioneering work on the new realities of punishment in America vis-a-vis public safety, families and children, work, housing, public health, civic identity, and community capacity. Travis proposes organizing the criminal justice system around five principles of reentry to encourage change and spur innovation.

In Beyond Privatopia: Rethinking Residential Private Government, attorney and political science scholar Evan McKenzie explores emerging trends in private governments and competing schools of thought on how to operate them, from state oversight to laissez-faire libertarianism. The most common analyses see CIDs from a neoclassical economic, positive point of view. HoAs, this strain of analysis maintains, are more efficient and frugal than municipalities. And what could be more democratic than government of the neighbors, by the neighbors? But scholars coming from institutional analysis, communitarianism, and critical urban theory frameworks see possible repercussions. These include a development¿s failure leaving residents on the hook for crippling sums, capture or extension of the local state, and convergence of public and private local governments

Joseph J. Thorndike's history of the U.S. federal tax system from the 1920s until the end of World War II might feel familiar: the president with a progressive reputation who proves more pragmatic than his ardent supporters hoped, the legislators who serve the media apoplectic rhetoric, the magnates who pay no income tax and defend themselves with the perfectly true argument that doing so is 100 percent legal, and the public interested seeing everyone pay their fair share. Thorndike mines governmental and popular media archives to explore both the scholarship of taxes and the way we feel about paying them.

State Tax Policy is the only book that provides students and professionals with a concise, approachable, and up-to-date introduction to the intricacies of state tax policy.

The Nonprofit Almanac, Ninth Edition is an invaluable reference for managers of nonprofit organizations, foundations, and corporate social responsibility programs, as well as scholars, teachers, students, and journalists.

Nonprofits and Government provides students and practitioners with the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary, research-based inquiry into the collaborative and conflicting relationship between nonprofits and government at all levels: local, national, and international.

Nonprofits and Government provides students and practitioners with the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary, research-based inquiry into the collaborative and conflicting relationship between nonprofits and government at all levels: local, national, and international.

The 1990s' historic welfare reform legislation shifted U.S. social policy institutions from a bureaucratic, centralized mode for income transfer, to a ¿professional¿ mode aimed at complex behavioral change. The evaluation community has responded with a shift from traditional impact analyses to implementation studies that get to the heart of this more flexible structure. A Guide to Implementation Research, by Alan Werner, is the first volume to offer comprehensive, practical advice on conducting implementation studies in the context of program evaluation. The first chapter presents an introduction to implementation research and an overview of how to organize and conduct an implementation study. Chapter Two covers the variety of data needs and data collection techniques encountered in Implementation Research. Chapter Three describes how to organize the data to document program implementation and results. Chapter Four covers approaches to assess and explain program implementation. Each chapter contains multiple examples from the research literature as well as the work of professional evaluators. For students and practitioners of evaluation research, this book is a complete, concise, and essential guide.