Municipalities have revenue motives for enforcing traffic laws in addition to public-safety motives because many traffic offenses are punished via fines and the issuing municipality often retains the revenue. Anecdotal evidence supports this revenue motive. We empirically test the revenue motive...

By relaxing the assumption that states respond equally to competition, we demonstrate that significant regional differences exist in both the degree and direction of interstate competition. This suggests empirical models of interstate competition benefit from more complex forms of interaction.

Despite the renewed interest in fiscal rules to constrain government deficits and debt, most rules provide no guidelines for reaching fiscal objectives in practice. This note demonstrates how to construct simple and transparent savings-rate rules that could aid policymakers if balancing the...

The economic downturn that began in 2001 resulted in sizable budget shortfalls and arguably the worst fiscal conditions for state governments in decades. The use of savings to stabilize cyclical fluctuations in the budget has been institutionalized in most states in the form of budget...