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...

The institutions of federal fiscal-policy making seem incapable of confronting the central domestic issues of the day. This paper presents a model of congressional decision-making in which legislators' incentives are contrary to fiscal efficiency. In such an environment, a "strong" president may...

The structure of local taxation is an important determinant of the fiscal performance of decentralized public economies. In contrast to our understanding of local government spending, however, we know surprisingly little about how cities and states set taxes. This study specifies and estimates a...

The federalist fiscal structure of the United States has been evolving steadily towards the centralization of the financing of government services and transfers. Revenues are raised centrally and then transferred, via grants-in-aid, to state and local governments. This paper seeks to explain...

This paper empirically explores the impact of bank size, holding company affiliation and the degree of branching on small business and farm lending through a conceptual analysis encompassing private information asymmetries inherent in these bank dependent borrowers. The study expands the...