This primer provides an overview of the different types of general revenue taxes used in American state and local governments. The intended audience includes policy makers, their advisors, and other citizens interested in the trade-offs involved in setting tax policy. The primer begins with a...

The ability of communities to realize Pareto efficient outcomes may potentially be realized through the practice of fiscal zoning. A common concern to this theory is the prospect that political boundaries may undermine this process. If nuisance entities produce negative externalities that decay...

The conventional view of fiscal zoning is that communities only make land use accommodations to Nuisance Entities who generate enough fiscal benefits to compensate for their other undesirable traits. By representing a disproportionate burden of the property tax base, this finance-for-location...

This essay demonstrates the full range and potential contributions economists have to offer many academic disciplines. We argue that in the absence of a formula which identifies the length of the hypotenuse on a right-triangle, known today as the Pythagorean theorem, economists would have...

Public managers who operate within cross-jurisdictional governance regimes face substantial difficulties in facilitating network collaboration. Scholars have long suggested that non-congruence of geographic borders can create coordination problems among the political communities within...

Policy makers are frequently interested in soliciting unbiased information regarding alternative policies, and expert surveys can be influential. Since ranking policies is an often subjective process, there is always the concern of bias, both intentional and not. Expert bias is difficult to...

The SIC sectors identified for direct, indirect, and in kind rent seeking activity have been identified and verified empirically in Sobel & Garrett (2002) by comparing capital counties to non-capital counties. We convert these industries from SIC to NAICS codes and provide measures of direct,...

This paper provides a tractable theoretical model designed to capture the targeting incentives created by benchmark testing. Under high-stakes benchmark testing, schools and teachers are judged on the fraction of students that meet some given level of educational attainment. The incentive for...

This paper employs Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports of the 35 largest population American cities from 2005 to 2011 to examine how these cities managed the Great Recession, which was a global macroeconomic shock particularly damaging to the housing sector. While broader surveys of local...

Property tax limits are a subject of continual interest among policy makers. Indiana recently implemented tax caps that limit individual property tax burdens to a fixed percentage of market value. The resulting system creates structural deficits that depend on the simultaneous spending choices...