In reaction to the fiscal difficulties experienced by state governments over the past three years, several politicians and academics proposed that Congress legislate a new chapter to the Bankruptcy Code under which the financial obligations of a state may be restructured. This essay is...

Efforts to maintain balanced budgets, driven in part by formal requirements, lead to substantial pro-cyclicality in states' capital investments, transfers to local governments, and spending in areas like education and transportation. Extensive reliance on relatively volatile revenue sources...

In this paper, I demonstrate that an indicator which is commonly used to assess the long-term fiscal sustainability of public finances in EU member states (“S2”) is also defined if government borrowing rates are assumed to be permanently lower than the growth rate of GDP. I illustrate this...