The declining financial health of public pension systems is increasingly becoming a budget concern for many state and local governments. While the academic literature has identified several factors behind the growth in unfunded state and local public pension liabilities, there is mixed evidence...

The current paper explores the municipal debt crisis that resulted from the panic of 1873, which caused a significant number of local governments in the U.S. to default on their debt obligations. The aftermath of that episode was one of constitutional change meant to constrain municipal...

Numerous studies evaluate how a jurisdiction’s institutional and specifically regulatory environment impact firm formation and entrepreneurial activity. This study adds to this by employing a dataset measuring the differential impact that federal regulations have on industries across US...

This article addresses the extent to which differences in judicial independence across US states influences economic freedom using the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of North America index. Overall, the results suggest that as judicial independence increases within a state’s court of...

Significant research has assessed how judicial independence influences a number of economic outcomes, however less has been done to evaluate how financial institutions perceive an independent judiciary. Therefore, this paper considers how greater judicial independence across US states may affect...