Last Friday our seminar speaker in the West Virginia economics department was William Fischel. Bill is a longtime professor of economics at Dartmouth College and a great local public finance and urban economics scholar. He is the author of three major books and dozens of articles in journal like such as the Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Urban Economics, and the National Tax Journal. It is because of his book The Homevoter Hypothesis that I chose urban and regional economics as one of my primary fields. Needless to say, I was ecstatic when Bill said he would make the long trip to WVU from UC Santa Barbara (where he is on sabattical).

The paper he presented was “Will I See You in September? An Economic Explanation for the Standard School Calendar,” which is forthcoming in the Journal of Urban Economics. To me, this article is indicative of much of Bill’s work. It shows how far basic economic institution and hard work can take you. As he recounted to the seminar, he was reading a book on the history of education that noted in the nineteenth century schools had two terms: winter and summer. Children were needed on the farm to plant in the spring and harvest in the fall, thus having summers off is not a leftover from our agrarian past. In Fischel’s story, summer vacation spontaneously evolved to deal with the coordination problem of having graded school systems and a mobile population.

My short synopsis here does not do the paper justice. I highly recommend reading the whole thing as well as Bill's other works on the economics of zoning, regulatory takings, and school finance reform.