While the importance of municipal bonds for the provision of public services is well-documented, the consequences of municipal bankruptcies remain understudied. We contribute to this literature by studying the effects of municipal bankruptcies on crime. Using the staggered...

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...

The aim of the article is to reveal the features of self-taxation as an independent form oflocal budget revenues. There is no consensus among domestic and foreign scholars onunderstanding the nature, place, and role of self-taxation in the system of income sources ofterritorial communities....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

In der nun bereits als 9. Auflage des sowohl für die Ausbildung als auch in der Praxis bewährten Studienbuches wurden alle Kapitel überarbeitet und auf den aktuellen Stand der Rechtsentwicklung gebracht. Die für die Haushalts- und Finanzwirtschaft der niedersächsischen Kommunen wichtigen...

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),...

Citizens' attitudes and reactions to policymakers' decisions depend on several factors, including informal institutions. The novelty of this paper is to use social capital as a moderator factor to shed light on the relationship between fiscal policies and electoral outcomes. We investigate this...

The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic has raised a considerable alarm about issues of public health and safety. The response to the outbreak, however, has also brought concern regarding its impact on local governments in the United States. Local governments have been a primary respondent in...

We use a policy change that occurred in Oregon in the late 1980s to re‐visit the budget‐maximizing agenda setter theory of local public expenditure. Prior to 1987, Oregon school districts held operating levy elections with an exogenous, often zero or very low, spending reversion. From 1987...

Despite robust economies, many local officials entered 2020 already worried about budget balances that looked fragile in the short term and problematic in the long term due to enormous pension and health-care issues. Today, in the wake of COVID-19, clearly federal support is necessary, but it is...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...