Helen F. Ladd is an education economist who currently works as the Susan B. King Professor Emeritus of Public Policy and Economics at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy. In recognition of her research on the economics of education, she has been elected to the National Academy for Education and the National Academy of Sciences.
Biography
Helen Ladd earned a B.A. from Wellesley College in 1967, a master's degree from the London School of Economics in 1968 and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1974, writing a thesis on the relationship between local public expenditures and the composition of the property tax base under Richard Musgrave and Martin Feldstein. After her Ph.D., Ladd worked as Assistant Professor of Economics at Wellesley College (1974–77) and then as Assistant Professor and later Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning at Harvard University (1978–86) before moving to Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy in 1986. There, she has been a Professor of Public Policy and, since 1991, also a Professor of Economics, until her emeritation in 2017. Since 2014, she has been the Susan B. King Professor Emerita of Public Policy and Economics. Additionally, Ladd has held visiting appointments at the University of Wellington, University of Cape Town, University of Amsterdam and at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (London). In addition to her academic positions, she is affiliated with the Brookings Institution, Learning Policy Institute, National Bureau of Economic Research, and Urban Institute, and has repeatedly presided over the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. Moreover, she has co-chaired a National Academy of Sciences Committee on Education Finance from 1996 to 1999. Finally, she performs editorial duties for Regional Science and Urban Economics, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, and Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, and has done so in the past for Research on Urban Policy, Journal of the American Planning Association, Evaluation Review, and the National Tax Journal.
Ladd is married to Edward Fiske.
Ladd was one of the signees of a 2018 amici curiae brief that expressed support for Harvard University in the Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College lawsuit. Other signees of the brief include Alan B. Krueger, Robert M. Solow, George A. Akerlof, Janet Yellen, as well as numerous others.
Research
Ladd's research focuses on school finance, school accountability, teacher labour markets, school choice, and early childhood programmes. Therein, she has frequently collaborated with Charles Clotfelter, Jacob Vigdor as well as with her husband and fellow educational researcher Edward Fiske. According to IDEAS/RePEc, she belongs to the top 5% of economists in terms of research output.
Research on public finance
Early in her research career, Ladd conducted extensive research on local public finance. She found that commercial property in Boston has a stronger impact on the demand for local education expenditures than industrial property and criticizes the use of total property tax base per pupil as a measure for local fiscal capacity for education. Ladd has also contributed to the debate on how to optimize state aid in the U.S. in order to offset fiscal disparities (low resources or high costs) across communities (with Katharine Bradbury, Mark Perrault, Andrew Reschovsky and John Yinger). Together with Yinger, Ladd has further expanded on the fiscal crisis of U.S. cities in the 1970s and early 1980s in her book America's Ailing Cities, wherein she explores how it affected cities' policies and disparities between them. Researching local tax mimicking between neighbouring U.S. counties, Ladd finds evidence of it with regard to the burdens of total local taxes and property taxes but not of sales taxes. Studying the relationship between public finances and local population growth in the U.S., Ladd finds a U-shaped relationship between spending and density and a positive relationship between local population growth and per capita public spending, with the effect mainly reflecting the higher population density and a larger share of local public spending, suggesting that established residents in fast-growing areas may experience declining quality in public services and/or rising local tax burdens.