Abstract
In 1993, the State of Georgia passed the Lottery for Education Act. This allowed Georgia to legalize gambling in the form of a lottery program and increase education expenditure with the profit earned from this program. In order to gain a better understanding of the effectiveness of the lottery program, our research focuses on pre-kindergarten education funding at the county level. Georgia’s pre-kindergarten program is solely funded by the Georgia State Lottery. Therefore, this paper examines the effect of county characteristics on the average amount of lottery revenue spent per pre-k pupil. We use pooled cross-sectional data on county characteristics from all 159 counties. These county characteristics include average enrollment, income, unemployment rate, crime rate, percentage of non-white residents, as well as state and local government funding.
