The financing of public employee pensions has become an issue of growing public concern. This paper examines the fundinq status of teacher pension plans for the fifty states and for selected localities for the decade, 1971-1980. A pension underfunding equation based upon actuarial principles is...

Recent proposals to reform the U.S. tax code all contain significant reforms of the cufrent provision allowing for the deductibility of state and local taxes.This paper examines the effect of deductibility reform on the revenue decisions of the largest U.S. cities. The analysis of eight...

The 2007-2010 recession has imposed significant fiscal hardships on state and local governments. The result has been state deficits and the need to increase state taxes, cut spending, and withdraw funds from state rainy day accounts. The primary cause of state budget "gaps" has been the rise in...

The flypaper effect results when a dollar of exogenous grants-in-aid leads to significantly greater public spending than an equivalent dollar of citizen income: Money sticks where it hits. Viewing governments as agents for a representative citizen voter, this empirical result is an anomaly. Four...

What is it about federal governance that makes it so attractive to economists, political philosophers, and legal scholars and is there any evidence that would suggest all this attention is warranted? Proponents see federalism as a means to more efficient public and private economies, as the...

The `Excessive Deficit Procedure' of the Maastricht Treaty on Economic and Monetary Union proposes two fiscal convergence conditions for entry and continued membership in the EMU: 1) a country's overall budget deficit for each fiscal year must be equal to or below 3% of GDP, and 2) a country's...