Economic development incentives are offered by local governments in the United States to retain or attract manufacturing and/or commercial enterprises. We are concerned with "first wave" incentives that began in the United States in the 1970s and continue until today. These include:...

Anderson and Wassmer examine the use and effectiveness of local economic development incentives within a specific region, the Detroit metropolitan area. The Detroit area serves as a good example, they say, because of the area's 20-plus year track record of its communities offering the gamut of...

University students have been particularly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. We present results from the first wave of the Global COVID-19 Student Survey, which was administered at 28 universities in the United States, Spain, Australia, Sweden, Austria, Italy, and Mexico between April and...

Though there has been a recent outpouring of studies on the determinants of individual happiness, there remains a paucity of research on the influence of specific sub-national government policies. Additionally, theoretical expectations about how fiscal variables influence happiness are unclear,...

Manufacturing provides high paying jobs for nearly 10 percent of working Californians. Compared to the 2004 California median income of slightly more than $37,000, the average annual income earned in manufacturing was $57,000. Based upon a complex, but well accepted method of shift-share...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors that have produced the boom-to-bust budget cycles that the State of California has experienced since the passage of Proposition 13. This is first done by examining historical budget patterns for the State to see if there is any evidence...

We use results from the December 2016 CalSpeaks Survey to assess citizen understanding about how the property tax functions and the distributional impact of the tax. Key issues include (1) do California citizens today understand the provisions of Proposition 13 and the implications for how the...

Our objective is an assessment of individual preferences for various revenue options for local government to address inadequate service spending or revenue shortfalls. California offers an especially interesting place to explore such attitudes given Proposition 13 and the resulting decrease in...

Preschool attendance not only benefits the later learning of an individual and her subsequent income, it also provides external benefits to society in the forms of skill spillovers, education peer effects, reduced crime, and less government welfare spending/greater government tax revenue....

This research compares the actual magnitude of fuel taxes to the perceptions of these amounts. The issue is whether misperceptions about fuel taxes are contributing to voter perspectives about transportation finance and investment issues. A survey of likely Michigan voters shows that taxpayers...