This article will explore the extent, causes, and proposed solutions of the current fiscal crisis from a historical perspective of state finance. Although the current fiscal crisis is severe, it becomes more difficult to assess unless one has a more complete understanding of the historical...

Balanced-budget rules alone are not sufficient to ensure states’ long-term fiscal health.

This paper estimates the dynamics of the personal-bankruptcy rate over the business cycle by exploiting large cross-state variation in recessions and bankruptcies. We find that bankruptcy rates are significantly higher than normal during a recession and rise as a recession persists. After a...

Personal bankruptcy filings in the United States increased, per capita, nearly 350 percent between 1980 and 2005. This paper first addresses the changes in economic and institutional factors that have occurred over the past 100 years, many of which have occurred in the past 30 years, which are...

Over the past 24 years, the U.S. rate of personal bankruptcies jumped nearly 350 percent. The rate varies greatly among states. Tennessee's rate last year-the highest in the nation-was more than 10 filings per 1,000 people, nearly four times the rate in Massachusetts.

This article examines the current state budget crises from a historical perspective. The role of major expenditures and revenue sources in the context of the current slowdown and how reliance on various revenue sources has changed since World War II are addressed. Tax revenue variability over...