State tax amnesties have become a commonplace component of state tax administration over the last 30 years. This paper reviews the structural evolution of all state amnesty programs and makes the case that their fundamental purpose has shifted from improving tax administration to emphasizing...

The property tax rate, according to the residual view, is simply the ratio of levies over total assessed values, so that growth in property values is irrelevant to the revenue raised. Critics of this view claim instead that fiscal illusion allows policymakers to take advantage of increased...

This paper provides a tractable theoretical model designed to capture the targeting incentives created by benchmark testing. Under high-stakes benchmark testing, schools and teachers are judged on the fraction of students that meet some given level of educational attainment. The incentive for...

Governments are subjected to many sources of competition that can be productive or destructive to their ability to maintain citizen trust. This paper explores the role of competition in the local government marketplace as a determinant of trust in local government. Using individual respondent...

A mainstream motivation for decentralized government is to enable public service investments to better align with political preferences that may differ by geographical region. This paper examines how political preferences determine local government provision of hospital services. We find that...

In hedonic analysis, a common approach for eliciting information regarding the welfare significance of some landmark or (dis)amenity is to control for its distance from each observation. Unfortunately, the effects of distances to amenities on housing prices are generally not consistent...

While typically not a formulator of policy, property assessors are likely sensitive to political incentives as they are either directly elected to their office or appointed by another elected official. This paper estimates a model that is motivated by the assumption that assessors seek to...

Can the federal budget be constrained using congressionally self-imposed rules? The Budgetary Enforcement Act of 1990 (BEA90), in effect from 1992 to 2002, is frequently held up as an example of congressional control that largely succeeded in doing so and its expiration is considered a watershed...