The recent move towards decentralization in countries such as Spain, Hungary, and South Africa and the difficulties that central governments have had in dealing with fiscal irresponsibility on the part of regional governments in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, and India has made the study...

States and their local governments vary both in their needs to provide basic public services and in their abilities to raise revenues to pay for those services. A joint study by the Tax Policy Center and the New England Policy Center at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston uses the Representative...

Abstract: How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected state budgets? Using a quarterly panel of states between 1994 and 2019, we estimate how changes in employment affect tax revenues. We find that a one percentage point (pp) rise in employment is associated with a 1.56pp rise in total tax revenue,...

This paper uses a simple model of fiscal competition between local jurisdictions to analyse the impact of intergovernmental grants on the composition of public spending. We find that a higher degree of redistribution within a system of fiscal equalisation coincides with a smaller overall share...

State and local government spending has grown at a remarkable pace in the years since World War II. Many states have attempted to arrest this growth by adopting tax or expenditure limitations (TELs). These are formal rules – either codified in statutes or in state constitutions – that limit...

Der Mainzer Impfstoffhersteller Biontech hatte 2021 eine glänzende Geschäftsentwicklung, die zu einem sprunghaften Anstieg der rheinland-pfälzischen Steuereinnahmen geführt hat. Damit gehört das seit jeher finanzschwache Land Rheinland-Pfalz plötzlich zu den finanzstärksten Bundesländern...

The number of parties in government is usually considered to increase spending. We show that this is not necessarily the case. Using a new method to detect close election outcomes in multi-party systems, we isolate truly exogenous variation in the type of government. With data from...

In recent years debt in Colorado has increased at an unsustainable rate. A debt brake is simulated for the Colorado economy. When the debt brake is triggered the spending cap imposed by the Tabor Amendment is reduced, with surplus revenue earmarked for debt reduction. The simulation analysis...

This pilot study presents indicators that assess sub-central government (SCG) spending power by policy area. Traditional indicators – such as the share of SCG in total government spending – are often misleading as they underestimate the impact of central government regulation on sub-central...

Despite strongly equalized per capita revenue and similar budgetary institutions, fiscal performance is increasingly diverging across German federal states. Given that state and local governments are endowed with expenditure autonomy, this paper investigates whether the composition of...