Nguyen Wins Jean Flanigan Outstanding Dissertation Award

Public Finance researcher Phuong Nguyen has been awarded the 2012 Jean Flanigan Outstanding Dissertation Award by the Association for Education Finance & Policy (AEFP). In announcing the honor, the AEFP Awards Committee stated that Professor Nguyen's research "exemplifies the caliber of scholarship that we seek to support."

Dr. Nguyen's dissertation explores education policies and finance issues in three locations. It first examines the impact of reform enacted in 1993 in Massachusettson on student performance and a district’s institutional structure. The results indicate that changes in state education aid following the reform resulted in significantly higher student performance. He then explores the effects of budget referendums on school inputs using data for small city school districts (SCSDs) in New York State in 1998. This analysis determined that SCSDs reduce instructional spending and increase student-teacher ratios while preserving administrative spending. An article on this portion of the work was published in Public Choice. Finally, Dr. Nguyen looks into the education finance system in Vietnam to demonstrate how cost function analysis can be used to address weaknesses in the current norms for intergovernmental educational transfers. This work has appeared separately in Education Economics.

The award will be announced at the first general session of the AEFP Annual Conference in Boston on Thursday, March 15, 2012, and includes an honorarium of $1,000.