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Journal Article
Use of rainy day funds in Third District states
Rainy day fund is the popular name for special reserve funds employed by all but three states (Arkansas, Kansas, and Montana) to provide a more flexible response to emergencies and/or cyclical fiscal extremes. This is the primary policy tool designed specifically to help states address fiscal stresses generated by recessions. By transferring a portion of budget surpluses to their rainy day funds during years of strong economic growth and rising revenues, states can reduce the need to raise taxes and cut services during years of weak growth and declining revenues.
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. ...
Working Paper
Premium Municipal Bonds and Issuer Fiscal Distress
Economic theory suggests that bond issuers of lower credit quality or higher opacity should be more likely to issue bonds with premium coupons (higher coupon rates relative to yields at issuance). Using a comprehensive data set of municipal bonds issued between 1992 and 2012 by more than 21,000 issuers, we show that this has not been the case until the early 2000s. We examine what changed in this market to bring it into greater alignment with economic principles. We argue that the Government Accounting Standards Board?s Statement 34 that required the use of accrual accounting rules in ...