In this broad and illuminating work, experts on public finance discuss innovations in state and local tax policy that have been implemented or considered over the course of the last three decades. The authors provide original work that analyzes whether state and local governments have...

This paper formalizes and empirically tests the hypothesis that the deficient maintenance of public infrastructure is caused by fiscal distress. The authors utilize a production-decision framework in which public officials combine maintenance and new capital to produce a desired level of capital...

When external effects are important, markets will be inefficient, and economists have considered several broad classes of economic instruments to correct these inefficiencies. However, the standard economic analysis has tended to neglect important distinctions and interactions between the...