In some ways, a 2012 symposium on “Dilemmas of State Debt” may seem a bit behind the news curve. At the end of 2010, municipal bond markets were in a deep funk. Analysts predicted that countless municipalities and perhaps one or more of the United States might default on their debt...

In November 2008, China announced a RMB4trn package of economic stimulus measures that also dealt with how it would be funded. As a result, in March 2009, the National People's Congress (China's parliament), with the approval of the central government, authorized the Ministry of Finance to issue...

The federal government is headed toward a financial crisis as a result of chronic overspending, large deficits, and huge future cost increases in Social Security and Medicare. Social Security and Medicare would be big fiscal challenges even if the rest of the government were lean and efficient,...

The paper investigates the reaction of public R&D spending on economic crises. We are interested in two counteracting motives: On the one hand, public R&D spending can be seen as a means to fight the crisis, and governments may decide to increase their R&D budgets. On the other hand, a crisis...

In 2012, Superstorm Sandy caused more than $70 billion in damage on the eastern seaboard, more than $19 billion in the New York City area alone. It is currently the fourth most costly storm in U.S. history. Prior to Sandy, it was almost without question that mass natural disasters occurring on...

All countries, especially developing countries with limited financial resources, face difficult decisions in prioritizing public funds for investment projects in order to achieve strategic public goals in the face of multiple demands. Effective investment often requires coordination between...

We analyze the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program, which was part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), to determine the extent to which political influence affected implementation of the program. While other studies analyze the ARRA in totality, we focus on a...

Über dem Haushaltsentwurf der nordrhein-westfälischen Landesregierung für das Jahr 2024 schwebt die Schuldenbremse. Im Grunde kommt das Verbot der strukturellen Neuverschuldung auf Länderebene das erste Mal zum Tragen, nachdem die regulären Grenzen im Zeitraum von 2020 bis 2023 ausgesetzt...

The U.S. economy is growing more slowly than it can and should be growing because it does not invest enough in infrastructure, science, and education. There is an important procedural obstacle to funding public investments — a process of scoring the economic effect of legislation. This process...

The challenge for fiscal policy in Slovakia is to achieve fiscal consolidation in a way which supports the fragile recovery and protects spending on areas which are important for re-embarking on a trajectory of high trend growth and underpinning a catch-up in living standards. While the recently...