Search Results
Working Paper
Regional Consumption Responses and the Aggregate Fiscal Multiplier
We use regional variation in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009-2012) to analyze the effect of government spending on consumer spending. Our consumption data come from household-level retail purchases in the Nielsen scanner data and auto purchases from Equifax credit balances. We estimate that a $1 increase in county-level government spending increases local non-durable consumer spending by $0.29 and local auto spending by $0.09. We translate the regional consumption responses to an aggregate fiscal multiplier using a multiregional, New Keynesian model with heterogeneous agents, ...
Journal Article
The fiscal position of the state and local government sector: developments in the 1990s
After a difficult period during the early 1990s, the fiscal position of state and local governments has improved considerably in the past three years. States, as a group, have fared relatively well, although some local governments are still struggling with fiscal difficulties. In addition, the sector as a whole continues to face persistent underlying structural problems. This article first examines the primary budget concepts that are generally used to evaluate the fiscal condition of state and local governments. Then it surveys the status of the various levels of government, and finally, it ...
Newsletter
How vulnerable are insurance companies to a downturn in the municipal bond market?
As the U.S. economy remains weakened by the Covid-19 pandemic, concern persists for the health and resilience of the municipal bond market. Municipal bonds (muni bonds) are debt securities issued by state and local governments to raise money and are generally considered to be safe investments. However, the recent slowdown in economic activity due to Covid-19 created significant stress on state and local government budgets, leading to a heightened risk for municipal bond downgrades and possibly even defaults. In this Chicago Fed Letter, we examine to what extent property and casualty (P&C) and ...
Cedar Valley Kids: Addressing Local Childcare Needs Through Community Collaboration and Employer Partnerships
As part of the Chicago Fed’s Spotlight on Childcare and the Labor Market, we describe the Black Hawk County Child Care Coalition—a burgeoning alliance of community partners in northeast Iowa working to create a local solution for a local challenge. We also explain what went into recently launching the Cedar Valley Kids (CVK) childcare facility in Black Hawk County—the culmination of years of effort by the coalition to help address local childcare shortages in the wider six-county region.
Working Paper
Do Low-Income Rental Housing Programs Complement Each Other? Evidence from Ohio
We characterize rental subsidy use in units developed with construction subsidies and explore whether the subsidy overlap responds to needs unmet by a tenant-based program alone. We present a subsidy allocation model allowing for program complementarity to guide our analysis of multiple subsidy use in Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) units. Findings for Ohio in 2011 suggest that rental assistance in LIHTC exhibits some degree of subsidy complementarity, particularly, when serving very poor households with special housing needs. We also find that very low income voucher holders who face a ...
Working Paper
Entrepreneurship and State Taxation
Entrepreneurship plays a vital role in the economy, yet there exists little well-identified research into the effects of taxes on startup activity. Using recently developed county-level data on startups, we examine the effect of states' corporate, personal and sales tax rates on new firm activity and test for cross-border spillovers in response to these policies. We find that new firm employment is negatively?and disproportionately?affected by corporate tax rates. We find little evidence of an effect of personal and sales taxes on entrepreneurial outcomes. Our results are robust to changes in ...
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.
Working Paper
Saving for a rainy day: estimating the appropriate size of U.S. state budget stabilization funds
Rainy day funds (RDFs) are potentially an important countercyclical tool for states to stabilize their budgets and the overall economy during economic downturns. However, U.S. states have often found themselves exhausting their RDFs and having to raise tax rates or reduce expenditures while still experiencing a downturn. Therefore, how much each state should save in its RDF has become an increasingly important policy question. To address this issue, this paper applies several new methodologies to develop target RDF levels for each U.S. state, based on the estimated short-term revenue ...
Report
Forecasting the New England States’ Tax Revenues in the Time of the COVID-19 Pandemic
State governments across the United States face the prospect of sharply declining tax revenues due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They need reliable and up-to-date revenue forecasts to make financially sound policy decisions during this public health and economic crisis. This paper proposes an objective, transparent, simple, and efficient method to forecast state tax revenues in this time of the COVID-19 pandemic. The model is based on only two input factors: the state unemployment rate and an empirically determined time trend. The predictions from the model closely track the actual values of tax ...
Working Paper
Opting in with the Joneses: What Affects the Timing of Municipal Adoption of a Local-option Meals Tax?
States use local-option taxes to promote local revenue diversification and improve local fiscal health. However, many sub-state governments wait a long time before adopting local-option taxes or do not adopt them at all, which seems puzzling or even irrational upon first glance. This paper uses the local-option meals tax in Massachusetts as a case study to examine the factors that affect the timing of local adoptions. It finds significant positive results for adoption by neighboring municipalities, which are robust to a variety of specifications, neighbor definitions, and weighting matrices. ...