The current paper presents a method of deciding the question of whether any given stage in the budget process is an example of the "political" or the "bureaucratic" model. We then use it to study local government spending on education. The basis for our method is the important difference between...

This paper provides a critical survey of the literature on politico-institutional determinants of the government budget. We organize our discussion around two questions: Why did certain OECD countries, but not others, accumulate large public debts? Why did these fiscal imbalances appear in the...

The fundamental feature of private contracting is its relational nature. When faced with unforeseen or unexpected circumstances, private parties, as long as the relation remains worthwhile, adjust their required performance without the need for costly renegotiation or formal recontracting....

This paper examines the intertemporal linkages between local government expenditures and revenues. In the terminology that has become standard in the literature on vector autoregression analysis, the issue is whether revenues Granger-cause expenditures, or expenditures Granger-cause revenues....

This paper contains a descriptive analysis o+ real per capita annual revenues, expenditures, deficits, debt levels and capital expenditures for federal, state and local government finance in the United States for the rears 1952-83. It summarizes each time series as a deterministic trend and an...

This paper investigates how the fiscal environment and the budgetary process affect wage and employment determination in the local public sector. The structure of the local tax system is found to be influential with significantly higher wages occurring in cities with access to local sales and/or...

This paper investigates the effects of deductibility of local taxes on communities' budgetary decisions. Our focus is on how changes in the tax price of local spending induced by deductibility affect the mix between deductible and nondeductible revenue sources, and on expenditures. The...