State revenue forecasts are a subject of seemingly constant critique from politicians, the media, and the academy over the nature of their outcomes as measured by the ability to accurately predict available resources. The opportunity to introduce political biases into the revenue baseline,...

The American system of fiscal federalism requires that state and local governments finance the bulk of their budgets from own-source revenues, not transfers. This article analyzes state total taxable resources from 1981 to 2003 to evaluate how state fiscal capacity has changed in that time and...

This paper seeks to produce evidence on the labor incidence of the taxation of machinery and equipment purchases by manufacturers under the state general sales tax. For the identification strategy, we exploit tax policy discontinuities among adjacent counties along state borders. The main...

Can the federal budget be constrained using congressionally self-imposed rules? The Budgetary Enforcement Act of 1990 (BEA90), in effect from 1992 to 2002, is frequently held up as an example of congressional control that largely succeeded in doing so and its expiration is considered a watershed...

Corruption exacerbates state pension underfunding through all relevant aspects: a more generous pension benefit promise, lower actuarially required contributions (ARC), lower actual contributions, and poorer investment performance. By reducing corruption by one standard deviation from the mean,...

The authors examine the effect of sales taxes on business services and say that states should not extend sales taxes to those services. States should not tax business inputs, the authors say; businesses are already paying more than $100 billion in sales taxes on services, they calculate