We develop a new measure of relative debt transparency by comparing the amount of state debt reported in the annual Census survey and the amount reported in the statistical section of the state Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR). GASB 44 requires states to start reporting their total...

Since the 1970s, the North Carolina Legislature has authorized its counties to levy four local option sales taxes (LOST). Proceeds from two of them are partially restricted for school capital needs; two other LOST are used to augment counties' general revenues that may also affect school capital...

States are financing a larger share of capital investment by school districts but little is known about district response to facility aid programs. This paper addresses this gap by examining how a short-term increase in the matching rate for the Building Aid program in New York affected district...

In recent decades, the responsibility for the financing of compulsory education in rural China has rested with townships and villages which, with limited tax authority and uneven revenue capacity, increasingly relied on a plethora of arbitrarily imposed fees for funding. To reduce farmers‘...

Since the 1990s, China has pushed forward the province-managing-county (PMC) reform in some provinces as an experiment of fiscal decentralization. The reform provides a good opportunity to examine the impact of fiscal decentralization on fiscal behaviors of local governments in China. Using a...

Anderson, Goeree and Ramer (1997) observe that although the Uniform consumer density is almost universally assumed in Hotelling style location games, it is more realistic to assume non-uniform distributions. Using Anderson et al.'s (1997) sufficient conditions for the existence of a unique pure...