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Merit Aid, Student Mobility, and the Role of College Selectivity
In this paper, we investigate the role of college selectivity in college choice decisions (both in-state and out-of-state) of freshmen students following Georgia's HOPE scholarship program. How did HOPE affect the selectivity of colleges attended by Georgia's freshmen students? Did it induce Georgia's freshmen students who would have otherwise attended more selective out-of-state colleges to instead attend less selective in-state ones? Or was there movement to more selective ones, both in-state and out-of-state? Using student residency and enrollment data from IPEDS and selectivity data from ...
Working Paper
Smoothing state tax revenues over the business cycle: gauging fiscal needs and opportunities
During the two most recent U.S. recessions in 2001 and in 2007?2009, state governments experienced an unusually high degree of fiscal stress due to increased revenue cyclicality. Expanding upon the aggregate evidence, this paper explores the degree to which individual states have experienced fluctuating tax receipts over the business cycle. The findings provide state policymakers with information to better understand the extent and causes of this tax revenue cyclicality and, in the context of balanced budget requirements, the efficacy of alternative measures that might be employed to smooth ...
Working Paper
External and Public Debt Crises
The recent debt crises in Europe and the U.S. states feature similar sharp increases in spreads on government debt but also show important differences. In Europe, the crisis occurred at high government indebtedness levels and had spillovers to the private sector. In the United States, state government indebtedness was low, and the crisis had no spillovers to the private sector. We show theoretically and empirically that these different debt experiences result from the interplay between differences in the ability of governments to interfere in private external debt contracts and differences in ...
Working Paper
Black Mayors and Black Communities
Do Black communities economically benefit from the election of a Black mayor? I find majority-Black ZIP codes experience gains in all areas of economic activity relative to non-Black communities following the first election of a Black mayor. Across industries, the number of establishments in majority-Black ZIP codes increases, including those that rely on foot traffic. Before breakthrough elections, Black residents are less likely than white residents to identify as self-employed across all cities, but this difference is reduced after an election; however, the cities in which the ...
Working Paper
Fiscal stimulus in economic unions: what role for states?
The Great Recession and the subsequent passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act returned fiscal policy, and particularly the importance of state and local governments, to the center stage of macroeconomic policymaking. This paper addresses three questions for the design of intergovernmental macroeconomic fiscal policies. First, are such policies necessary? An analysis of U.S. state fiscal policies show state deficits (in particular from tax cuts) can stimulate state economies in the short run but that there are significant job spillovers to neighboring states. Central government ...
Journal Article
COVID-19 Challenges State and Local Government Finances
As the coronavirus pandemic wreaks havoc on the U.S. economy, state and local governments will not be immune from the pain. In the near term, governments face liquidity challenges, as many tax deadlines have been postponed. In the longer term, governments will experience large revenue declines that may lead to significant budget cuts.
Journal Article
The 2009 recovery act: directly created and saved jobs were primarily in government
Over one-half of the fiscal spending component of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA; i.e., the Recovery Act) was allocated via grants, loans, and contracts. Businesses, nonprofits, and nonfederal government agencies that received this type of stimulus funding were required to report the number of jobs directly created and saved as a result of their funding. Created and saved jobs represent, precisely, the full-time equivalent of jobs funded by first- and second-tier recipients of and contractors on ARRA grants, loans, and contracts. In this article, the author categorizes these ...
Working Paper
The Political Economy of Underfunded Municipal Pension
This paper analyzes the determinants of underfunding of local government?s pension funds using a politico-economic overlapping generations model. We show that a binding down payment constraint in the housing market dampens capitalization of future taxes into current land prices. Thus, a local government?s pension funding policy matters for land prices and the utility of young households. Underfunding arises in equilibrium if the pension funding policy is set by the old generation. Young households instead favor a policy of full funding. Empirical results based on cross-city comparisons in the ...
Working Paper
Dynamic Sales Tax Competition: Evidence from Panel Data at the Border
We examine both vertical and horizontal tax competition over time by studying the strategic response of county sales taxation to state sales taxes and to cross-border neighboring municipalities’ combined (state and county) taxes. Using county and state sales tax data from 2003 through 2009, we employ both static and dynamic panel analysis as well as an instrumental variables approach in combination with a border analysis. Our results confirm the presence of tax competition in the cross section, as previous studies have found. Results from the fixed-effects and dynamic panel analysis also ...
Working Paper
What determines the level of local business property taxes?
Conventional economic theory intuitively holds that local business property taxes, which account for over one-third of the state and local taxes that firms pay, should be efficiently structured in order to recover the exact cost of providing public services to these firms. However, this conceptual thinking does not accord with observed geographic and over-time variation in business taxation. To better explain these discrepancies, the author develops an alternative theoretical model with heterogeneous firms, some of which are more profitable than others in certain locations. This model more ...