Dr. Pengju Zhang Awarded Samuels Public Affairs Fellowship for Academic Year 2024-2025
Dr. Pengju Zhang, associate professor and the director of international programs in the School of Public Affairs and Administration (SPAA) at Rutgers University–Newark, has been awarded the Samuels Public Affairs Fellowship for academic year 2024-2025 from the Howard J. Samuels State and City Policy Center housed in Baruch College’s Austin W. Marxe School of Public and International Affairs.
The primary goal of the fellowship program, which supports exceptional public affairs scholars and practitioners, is to promote research on the state and local public sector, with a special focus on New York State and New York City. Fellowship applicants come from any academic discipline, including but not limited to public affairs, public administration, political science, economics, sociology, urban studies, communication, other social sciences and the humanities. Awardees receive a grant of $5,000 to support research on their proposed and accepted project that has significant potential to inform the policy process.
Dr. Zhang's fellowship project, "From Implementation to Impact: Reflecting on a Decade of New York's Property Tax Cap," will examine the impact of the tax cap on schools and student performance:
"In 2011, the state of New York (NY) established a property tax levy limit that affects all local governments with property taxing power, including school districts. Effective in Fiscal Year 2013, the cap restricts the annual growth of local property tax levies to two percent or the rate of inflation, whichever is less. In 2019, the New York legislature and then-Governor Andrew Cuomo further solidified the cap and reached a budget agreement that made the state’s property tax cap permanent (The New York State Senate, 2019). Building on short-term findings in existing literature, this project will provide a comprehensive, long-term assessment of the property tax cap’s impact on school district finance and student performance over its first decade and offer timely policy recommendations for New York decision-makers."
Dr. Zhang specializes in state and local public finance, local government studies, education finance and policy, and development policy. His work has appeared in many peer-reviewed journals, including National Tax Journal, International Tax and Public Finance, Education Finance and Policy, Public Budgeting and Finance, American Review of Public Administration, The Journal of Regional Science, and Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, among others. He primarily teaches Economics for Public Administration, Public Budgeting and Finance, and Government Revenue Theory and Administration at Rutgers University.