This paper assesses the impact of the mortgage crisis on Chelsea, Massachusetts, a low-and moderate income community of 35,000 adjacent to Boston. After years of rapid growth, house prices started falling in 2005. According to our repeat-sales indices, by the end of 2009 prices had fallen by as...

During the Great Recession and its aftermath, state and local governments’ revenue streams dried up due to diminished taxes. Budget cuts affected many aspects of government; in this paper, we investigate whether (and how) local school districts modified their funding and taxing decisions in...

This paper analyses the EU's response to the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis. It examines the background to the crisis and how the threat to the single currency taxed the decision-making capacity of the EU, while also exposing long-standing fears about an absence of democratic legitimacy. In...

Drawing on an analysis of austerity reforms in Greece and Portugal during the sovereign debt crisis from 2009 onwards, we show how the nature of the linkages between parties and citizens shapes party strategies of fiscal retrenchment. We argue that parties which rely to a greater extent on the...

Fiscal distress of local governments and municipalities is a non-negligible component of the public finance turmoil after the Great Recession. In this paper we consider a dataset of Italian municipalities over the period 2000-2012 and look for the main budget determinants of local default....