About

Professor Lori L. Taylor is the Head of the Department of Public Service and Administration at the Bush School of Government & Public Service, Texas A&M University, and holds the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Chair in Business and Government. She currently serves as the Principal Investigator for the Texas Smart Schools Initiative, is a member of the Holdsworth Center Network of Scholars, and serves on the Editorial Board for AERA Open as well as the Governing Board of the Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Southwest. Dr. Taylor developed the National Center for Education Statistics’ Comparable Wage Index (CWI) and the Comparable Wage Index for Teachers (CWIFT), and has written extensively on issues related to school finance, including the measurement of regional cost variations, determinants of school district efficiency, and teacher compensation. She holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Rochester and earned both a BA in Economics and a BS in Business Administration from the University of Kansas. Prior to her tenure at the Bush School, she spent fourteen years as an economist and policy advisor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. In 2020, she was named a Distinguished Fellow of Research and Practice by the National Education Finance Academy.

Research topics

• Business
• Political Science
• Public administration
• Accounting
• Social psychology
• Finance
• Economic growth
• Microeconomics
• Demographic economics
• Labour economics
• Management
• Psychology
• Economics

Selected publications

• Top heavy? On the allocative efficiency of small school districts

  International Transactions in Operational Research · 2025-02-02 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Policymakers tend to presume that small local education agencies (LEAs) are administratively top heavy, but indivisibilities at the classroom level could just as easily lead small LEAs to overuse teachers rather than administrators. This analysis uses an input distance function and administrative data on students, staff, and spending to estimate the technical and allocative efficiency of Texas public school districts. Our results suggest that small districts are no more likely to overuse administrators than to overuse teachers. Once likely determinants of inefficiency are taken into account, there is no relationship between school district size and the degree of allocative inefficiency. As such, our analysis casts doubt on the efficacy of efficiency rules of thumb that are common in public service practice.

  PublisherDOI

• Establishing an Agenda for Public Budgeting and Finance Research

  Deleted Journal · 2024 · 20 citations

  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Public administration

  Public budgeting and finance is a discipline that encompasses communities of research and practice. Too often, however, these communities fail to engage each other, instead choosing to operate independently. The result is that the research being conducted fails to address the questions of the day and our governments’ challenges. In this article, we come together as a community of academics and practitioners to establish an agenda for where future research should be conducted. This agenda aims to align the research being undertaken within the academic community with the needs of those working in the community of practice. After establishing ten areas where research is needed, we followed a ranked-choice voting process to establish a prioritization for them. Based on the outcome of this process, the two primary areas where research is currently needed most are the fiscal health of our governments and the implementation of social equity budgeting.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The role of poverty measurements in achieving educational equity through school finance reform

  Journal of Productivity Analysis · 2023-01-05 · 5 citations

  article1st author
  PublisherDOI

• A home visit program for low-income African American children with asthma: Caregivers' perception of asthma triggers and a gap in action

  Journal of Pediatric Nursing · 2022-10-31 · 3 citations

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  PublisherDOI

• Compensation and Composition: Does Strategic Compensation Affect Workforce Composition?

  Journal of Education Human Resources · 2021 · 5 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Business
  • Labour economics
  • Demographic economics

  Theory suggests that strategic compensation can not only serve as a powerful motivational incentive to increase worker performance, but also improve the composition of the workforce through the attraction and retention of high performers and discouragement of lesser performers from entering or staying in the profession. This study tests the compositional hypothesis of employment relationships by studying teacher compensation and incentives. In Tennessee, some school districts developed incentive pay plans that provided teachers with bonus awards, while other districts incorporated incentive pay into their salary schedules. This article uses panel data on individual teachers and a difference-in-differences instrumental-variables approach to examine the impact of those incentive programs on teacher retention. We also draw on detailed strategic compensation plan information, including award payout information, to examine the relationship between type of strategic compensation system and teacher turnover. Our analysis suggests that the strategic compensation programs in Tennessee had a significant impact on teacher turnover in participating schools. Implications for educational research, practice, and policy are discussed.

  PublisherDOI

• Fiscal slack, budget shocks, and performance in public organizations: evidence from public schools

  2020-12-01 · 3 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  Some scholars equate fiscal slack with organizational inefficiency, while others argue that it is a useful environmental buffer. This study takes the first step in reconciling these opposing views, by classifying fiscal slack as absorbed and unabsorbed slack in public organizations. In a sample of 1,000 Texas public school districts over 17 years, fund balance (unabsorbed fiscal slack) does not seem to affect student performance, unless there is a major downward budget shock. In the absence of a negative budget shock, non-instructional spending per pupil (absorbed fiscal slack) has a negative impact on performance change in an average school district, but no meaningful impact on student performance during a major budget shock.

  PublisherDOI

• Beyond the Scandal: Issues of Equity and Access in Higher Education Applications and Admission

  2019 APPAM Fall Research Conference · 2019-11-09

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• How to Do a Salary Equity Study: With an Illustrative Example From Higher Education

  Public Personnel Management · 2019-04-25 · 22 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Regular salary equity studies can be a best practice among employers committed to salary equity and fairly managed compensation. While a well-constructed salary study can identify inequities for amelioration, a poorly constructed study can create rather than solve problems. Organizations may be deterred from doing these studies because of their inherent analytical challenges. We provide a guide for human resource managers describing how to conduct their own salary studies, how to interpret the results, and how organizations can apply the results. We describe best practices across public sector organizations and illustrate them with an example from higher education. We also provide a link to an online appendix containing sample code that can be used to conduct such analyses using two popular software packages. The twin goals of the article are to increase the quality of salary analyses while reducing the barriers to conducting them.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• KIDS OR CASH? EXPLORING CHARTER SCHOOL RESPONSES TO DECLINING GOVERNMENT REVENUES

  Economic Inquiry · 2019-10-25 · 5 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  While the literature is extensive on school districts' revenue sources, less research has been done on the impact of donations on school district funds. In this paper, we extend the theoretical literature on crowding out of private donations by government grants for one type of nonprofit firm, namely charter schools. The theoretical model leads us to focus on the key relationships among fundraising effort, enrollment (which is tied to federal and state funding) and donations. Using a dataset on Texas charter schools we adopt a two‐stage approach to examine the empirical relationship between changes in nondonor revenues and the donations received by charter schools. Like the extensive empirical estimates of the effects of government grants on donations for other types of nonprofit firms, we find evidence of crowding‐out with respect to our sample of charter schools. We also find a significant, positive effect of fundraising on donations with a $1 increase in fundraising associated to a $0.58 increase in donations, a pattern consistent with overinvestment in fundraising. Enrollments exhibit a robust inverse relationship to changes in nondonor revenues. ( JEL H00, H32, H50)

  PublisherDOI

• Publication, Compensation, and the Public Affairs Discount: Does Gender Play a Role?

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2019-06-01 · 3 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper presents on three new styled facts: first, schools of public affairs hire many economists; second, those economists are disproportionately female; and third, salaries in schools of public affairs are, on average, lower than salaries in mainline departments of economics. We seek to understand the linkage, if any, among these facts. We assembled a unique database of over 2,150 faculty salary profiles from the top 50 Schools of Public Affairs in the United States as well as the corresponding Economics and Political Science departments. For each faculty member we obtained salary data to analyze the relationship between scholarly discipline, department placement, gender, and annual salary compensation. We found substantial pay differences based on departmental affiliation, significant differences in citation records between male and female faculty in schools of public affairs, and no evidence that the public affairs discount could be explained by compositional differences with respect to gender, experience or scholarly citations.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Kathy Hayes

  Southern Methodist University

  24 shared

• Shawna Grosskopf

  Oregon State University

  20 shared

• Timothy J. Gronberg

  15 shared

• Dennis W. Jansen

  Texas A&M University

  15 shared

• Matthew G. Springer

  Pennsylvania State University

  11 shared

• William Weber

  Southeast Missouri State University

  10 shared

• Mine K. Yücel

  Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas

  7 shared

• Mark Ehlert

  University of Missouri–Kansas City

  7 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Public Administration

  Texas A&M University

  2000

• M.S., Public Administration

  University of Texas at Austin

  1995

• B.A., Political Science

  University of Texas at Austin

  1993

Awards & honors

• 2020, Distinguished Fellow of Research and Practice by the N…