Brett Fischer presented a paper, "No Spending Without Representation: School Boards and the Racial Gap in Education Finance," at the AEFP's 45th Annual Conference Program . To address the question of whether a lack of minority representation on school boards hurts minority students, he used detailed school-level data from a large capital investment program to evaluate whether minority school board members increase spending on minority students. His instrumental variables estimates, which leverage exogenous variation on school board election ballots to deliver causal effects, show that minority school board officials allocate the marginal dollar to schools with high levels of poverty and nonwhite enrollment, and those investments raise student achievement in the medium-term. His analysis suggests that improving minority representation on school boards could help combat persistent racial gaps in education finance and achievement.