Local governments in New England rely on state aid to finance the provision of essential public services. Yet in response to the recent and ongoing fiscal crisis, state governments across the region have cut local aid deeply, often by the same percentage in each community. This across-the-board...

This paper develops a framework that distributes reductions in state aid based on underlying local fiscal health. Under this framework, the state gives smaller aid cuts to communities that are in worse underlying fiscal health and receive less existing aid. This framework therefore provides a...

This paper designs a new equalization-aid formula based on fiscal gaps of local communities. When states are in transition to a new local aid formula, the issue of whether and how to hold existing aid harmless poses a challenge. The authors show that some previous studies and the formulas...