The Government Finance Database : A Common Resource for Quantitative Research in Public Financial Analysis

Quantitative public financial management research is limited by the absence of a common database for empirical analysis (Gill and Meier 2000). While the U.S. Census Bureau distributes government finance data that some scholars have utilized, the arduous process of collecting, interpreting, and organizing the data has led its adoption to be prohibitive and inconsistent. In this article we offer a single, coherent resource that contains all of the census data from 1967-2011, uses easy to understand natural-language variable names, and will be extended when new data is available