Current U.S. tax law creates a variety of incentives affecting municipal financial policy. Under current law,municipalities can borrow at a tax-exempt interest rate yet can earn the full market rate of return on any assets held. Residents, in contrast, if they borrow or lend as individuals,pay...

Using newly available data, we document that internal migrants do not enjoy the same access to local public goods and services as city residents in China. We estimate a spatial overlapping generations model with heterogeneous households to quantify the impact of the Hukou system on urban fiscal...

Calls for reforming the civil rights enforcement regime often focus on individual government officers. Recent years have brought demands to abolish qualified immunity—a defense that protects individual officers from liability so long as they did not violate clearly established law—and to end...

The COVID-19 pandemic has put immense pressure on the fiscal situation. Central revenues have decelerated while expenditures had to be increased to facilitate economic recovery. Local governments faced even harder challenges as intergovernmental transfers were reduced and room for mobilizing...

In this paper I explore the effect of patronage or machine' politics on government performance in American cities during the Progressive era. I use game theoretic models and an empirical analysis of spending and public goods provision during the first decade of the twentieth century in a cross...

World experience shows that public participation in the budget process and openness in the public sector are the necessary conditions for a proper economic strategy of the State. Financial openness contributes to the efficient collection and distribution of public resources. It expands the...

Immovable property tax is one of the key elements of fiscal decentralization in the Czech Republic. It is the only tax that is directed to municipal budgets in the full amount. It is also the only tax the total receipts of which can be influenced by municipalities by means of corrective...

Almost 95% of long-term municipal bonds have callable features, and despite low interest rates, we find that a substantial fraction of local governments exercise these options with significant delays. Using data from 2001 to 2018, we estimate that U.S. municipals lost over $31 billion from...

With the renewed interest in cities as economic centers comes a need to understand how local public services and local taxes are likely to affect city economic performance. This paper provides an equilibrium model of an open city economy with mobile firms and resident workers. Given household...

Recent large municipal bankruptcy cases have called into question the rights of debtor-cities to impair their capital markets creditors, on the one hand, and beneficiaries of their unfunded public pension promises, on the other. As I show in a companion work, federal bankruptcy law generally...

The government fragmentation hypothesis (GFH) states that coalition governments spend more than single-party governments due to an underlying common pool problem. Using a large panel data set on 604 local governments in the German state of Baden-Württemberg for the 1994-2014 period, I test the...

The relevance of this research is based on the implications of low financial autonomy of rural municipalities referred to by the researchers, economists, and policymakers. The phenomenon of financial autonomy of municipalities is widely declared in the legal documents of the European Union (EU),...

Chapter 1 : Train Wreck Spotting (The Municipal Financial Crisis Is Here) -- Chapter 2: Inside City Budgeting -- Chapter 3: What City Government Does and What City Government Is -- Chapter 4: Why City Council Decisions Go Wrong -- Chapter 5: Failed Financial Analysis -- Chapter 6: Budget...

City governments are going bankrupt. Even the ones that aren’t are often stuck in financial chaos. It is easy to blame pensions, poor leadership, or a bad economy. But the problems go much deeper. With decades of experience in local government, author Mark Moses showcases the inside world of...

"The empirical research that has shaped this book was drawn from a combined literature stream comprising political psychology, applied economics, and public management issues such as decentralization, local government finance, local governance, and organization and budgeting theories. The...

A substantial fraction of local governments refinance their long-term debt with significant delays - resulting in sizable losses. Using data from 2001 to 2018, we estimate that U.S. municipals lost over $31 billion from this delayed refinancing, whereas the entire U.S. corporate sector, facing...

We study the role of political parties in shaping local fiscal policy in the context of Brazilian cities in the 2004-2016 period. Using a regression-discontinuity design, we find no effect of left-wing mayors on the size of the city government nor on the allocation of spending across main budget...

We link detailed data on defense spending, wages, hours, employment, establishments, and GDP across U.S. cities to study the effects of fiscal stimulus. Our small-open-economy empirical setting permits us to estimate key macroeconomic outcomes and elasticities, including the responses of the...

In 2009 and 2010, China undertook a 4 trillion Yuan fiscal stimulus, roughly equivalent to 12 percent of annual GDP. The “fiscal” stimulus was largely financed by off-balance sheet companies (local financing vehicles) that borrowed and spent on behalf of local governments. The off-balance...

We link detailed data on defense spending, wages, hours, employment, establishments, and GDP across U.S. cities to study the effects of fiscal stimulus. Our small-open-economy empirical setting permits us to estimate key macroeconomic outcomes and elasticities, including the responses of the...

"Cities require infrastructure as they grow and persist; infrastructure requires funding, typically from the bond market. But the bond market is not a neutral player. In this groundbreaking book, Destin Jenkins suggests that questions of urban infrastructure are inherently also questions of...

Chapter 1- Introduction -- Chapter 2- Fiscal Decentralization in India: An Overview -- Chapter 3 – Recommendations of SFCs: A Review -- Chapter 4- Impediments in the Functioning of SFCs and Good Practices -- Chapter 5- Conclusion and Recommendations.

Compared to the federal government, the average citizen in the U.S. has far greater interaction with city governments, including policing, health services, zoning laws, utilities, schooling, and transportation. At the regional level, it is city governments that provide the infrastructure and...