This paper designs a new equalization-aid formula based on fiscal gaps of local communities. Using conceptual analysis and simulations with Massachusetts data, the authors illustrate the tradeoffs that policymakers face in deciding on the policy variables in the formula and lay out several...

This paper studies racial and ethnic discrimination in discrete choices by real estate brokers using national audit data from the 2000 Housing Discrimination Study. It uses a fixed effects logit model to estimate the probability that discrimination occurs and to study the causes of...

State governments across the United States face the prospect of sharply declining tax revenues due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They need reliable and up-to-date revenue forecasts to make financially sound policy decisions during this public health and economic crisis. This paper proposes an...

China will be one of the major players of the future connected car industry because of its still growing domestic market, increasing technological advantages in ICT, data processing and platform services, strong industrial investment, and very dedicated industrial strategy and support from the...

We examine how the presence of a firm’s political connections in a candidate location affects the firm’s likelihood of choosing that location over unconnected but otherwise comparable ones to establish a new subsidiary. First, because of various benefits that political connections can...

Fiscal disparities occur when economic resources and public service needs are unevenly distributed across localities. There are two equity concerns associated with fiscal disparities. First, as Yinger (1986) shows, it is not considered fair to require two otherwise-identical households to pay a...

The conventional view of privacy, at least shared among privacy scholars, is that privacy is a rather culture — dependent issue and would be interpreted much differently in various jurisdictions. Though this is pretty true in the pre-digital age, the scenario may have been under considerable...

Local governments in New England rely on state aid to finance the provision of essential public services. Yet in response to the recent and ongoing fiscal crisis, state governments across the region have cut local aid deeply, often by the same percentage in each community. This across-the-board...

This paper draws on a conceptual analysis of discrimination to improve the methodology for estimating discrimination in small-business credit markets and to provide some evidence about the possible causes of discrimination in these markets. Using a variety of statistical enhancements to existing...

This paper develops new measures of non-school revenue capacity and environmental costs for Massachusetts cities and towns as the basis for a new municipal aid formula. On the capacity side, we account for the constraints of a tax limitation by estimating them as a function of residents'...