On December 5, 2007, the New England Public Policy Center at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston held its third annual policy symposium, “Financing Municipalities in New England: Revisiting the State-Local Relationship.” Through presentations and a panel discussion, the conference brought...

State governments creating their budgets are concerned about available revenues. The basis of a successful budget is a sound revenue forecast. How states arrive at this forecast is both a science and an art and the approach differs markedly among states. This policy brief responds to the dearth...

This policy brief provides guidelines for critically evaluating and interpreting empirical studies of state business tax credits. This brief summarizes analysis in NEPPC discussion paper 09-3: State Business Tax Incentives: Examining Evidence of their Effectiveness

This Research Report analyzes the features of the New England state pension plans in the context of the region's changing demographic environment. The first section of the report documents key demographic developments: the aging of the Baby Boom generation and increasing life expectancies. Key...

This report seeks to understand how New Hampshire has avoided a broad-based income or sales tax by examining the factors that drive the state's lower-than-average per capita spending and the revenue sources the state relies on to pay for that spending in lieu of an income or sales tax. It...

This paper uses data from the 2008 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice to discuss the adoption, use, and discarding of various common payment instruments. Using a nationally representative sample of individual-level data, it presents evidence in unparalleled detail about how consumers use...

High rates of unemployment entail substantial costs to the working population in terms of reduced subjective well-being. This paper studies the importance of individual economic security, in particular, job security, in workers' well-being by exploiting sector-specific institutional differences...

This brief describes a standard issued by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) in June 2004. Before the GASB 45 ruling, governments were not required to measure and report the long-term implications of OPEB promises; related expenses were recognized when retirees received benefits,...

This working paper was written for the New England Public Policy Center's third annual conference: “The Dynamic between Municipal Revenue Sources and the State-Local Relationship in New England”. It relies on data from the U.S. Census to examine the dynamic between municipal revenues and the...

Using data from approximately 1,000 small and mostly rural municipalities from Illinois, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin, the authors study choices in production arrangements over a wide range of services, and examine a variety of contracting options available to local governments. The data reveal...