Getting paid for the study is another economic impact.

• Author: Murray, Arthur O.
• Position: Tar Heel Tattler - Brief Article

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

John Maynard Keynes

When the Charlotte-based Real Estate and Building Industry Coalition wanted to know if residential real-estate development pays for the public services it needs, it hired UNC Charlotte economics professor John Connaughton. You may have heard of him.

The Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce, seeking a National Hockey League franchise in 1996, turned to him to assess a team's potential economic impact. He had done similar studies as part of the campaigns that brought the NBA's Charlotte Hornets and the NFL's Carolina Panthers to the Queen City. His hockey study concluded that the franchise would have $568 million of economic impact on Wake County in its first five years.

In 1998, backers of a baseball stadium in the Triad hired him. He concluded that a Major League team would have an annual economic impact of $140 million on the region. Voters still said no to the stadium.

Kyle Boyles, the real-estate coalition's deputy director, says his group picked Connaughton and fellow UNC Charlotte economics professor Ronald Madsen because they're local. Their study of Mecklenburg, Union, Gaston and Cabarrus counties showed what the group suspected it would: Single-family residential construction pays for itself.

That flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which says new property taxes aren't enough to pay for schools and other services they require. That view, Connaughton says, is based on a model in which teachers and other school employees are paid by local school districts, not by the state, as is the case in North...