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...

Developed by Musgrave (1959) and Oates (1972), the concept of fiscal federalism describes the process performed by the central governments to deal with the distribution problem and refer the provision of services to decentralized governments. In this respect, centralized governments should...

Economic segregation has increased over the past half century. The trend of rich localities getting richer while poor localities get poorer is particularly concerning because it limits upward mobility and perpetuates intergenerational income inequality. This Article makes the novel argument that...

California faces a significant pension-funding crisis. It has increased government-worker pensionbenefits repeatedly since the 1980s. Meanwhile, a California Supreme Court doctrine—theCalifornia Rule—has been understood to forbid cutting benefits for any currently employedgovernment workers,...

Part of the project Why Centralization and Decentralization in Federations?, this article studies dynamic de/centralization in Switzerland since 1848 and seeks to account for the patterns observed. It shows that, overall, there has been a wide-ranging process of legislative centralization,...

Has a $5.00 shipping fee ever made you second guess an online purchase? What about a sales tax? Apparently, our Supreme Court Justices pay no mind to the latter. South Dakota v. Wayfair annihilates the concept of tax-free online shopping and allows the states to compel online companies meeting...

This collection of papers by leading experts, emerging scholars, and policy makers in the field of municipal taxation and finance sets out the financial challenges facing municipalities in Canada today and examines various practical means of navigating these challenges

Like a number of other states, Oregon has been hampered in its pension reform efforts since 1996 by its state supreme court's embrace of the “California Rule,” a doctrine arising, in Oregon's case, from a misunderstanding of federal Contract Clause precedent. Under the misreading, states...