This paper focuses on risk premiums paid by central governments in Europe and sub-national governments in Germany, Spain, and Canada. With regard to the European governments, we are interested in how these premiums were affected by the introduction of the euro. Using data for bond yield spreads...

State budgets in the United States played a significant macroeconomic role in the 1970s and 1980s, and the level of cyclical responsiveness was affected by the severity of statutory and constitutional fiscal restraints. Moving from no fiscal restraints to the most stringent restraints lowered...

The degree to which credit markets discipline sovereign borrowers is investigated by estimating the supply curve for debt faced by US states. The results generally support an optimistic view of the market discipline hypothesis, with credit markets providing incentives for sovereign borrowers to...

Avocates of formal fiscal restraints on the member states of the European Monetary Union often argue that US experience proves that a monetary union needs such constraints to guarantee the stability of the common currency. We show, first, that the origin of formal fiscal restraints on US state...

This paper successfully fits a model of forward looking government savings behavior to data from the U.S. state Unemployment Insurance (UI) programs 1976-2008. Specifically, we find states do not perfectly smooth tax rates in Barro's sense, but follow behavior consistent with a buffer stock...

Build America Bonds (BABs) were issued by states and municipalities for twenty months as an alternative to tax-exempt bonds. The program was part of the 2009 fiscal stimulus package. The bonds are taxable to the holder, but the federal Treasury rebates 35% of the coupon payment to the issuer....

Most cities enjoy some autonomy over how they tax their residents, and that autonomy is typically exercised by multiple municipal governments within a given city. In this chapter, we document patterns of city-level taxation across countries, and we review the literature on a number of salient...

This paper examines strategic behaviour of developers who, through offering different public good packages and revenue/fiscal schemes, compete for residents who are differentiated by income. There is an endogenous determination of numbers and sizes of communities. Developers have an incentive to...

I present two flexible models of multivariate, count data regression that make use of the Sarmanov family of distributions. This approach overcomes several existing difficulties to extend Poisson regressions to the multivariate case, namely: i) it is able to account for both over and...