The rate of expansion and the breadth of COVID‐19 caught the world by surprise. From the perspective of nonprofit and public entities responsible for service provision, this pandemic is also unprecedented. The authors offer a RISE framework for navigating the fiscal effects of COVID‐19 and rely on recent surveys to assess the response strategies of local governments and nonprofit organizations. They find that many nonprofits were hit fastest and hardest by the pandemic and that local governments are, essentially, trying to figure out their financial condition moving into the next budget cycle.

During and after the Great Recession, many local governments were compelled to declare fiscal emergencies, lay off workers, and cut services while others weathered the recession without needing to take such actions. In this paper, we construct an action-based measure of fiscal distress using comprehensive annual financial reports, budgets, and media coverage and then use it as a dependent variable to model fiscal distress as a function of past financial performance and socio-economic environment. The empirical models show the relative importance of fiscal reserves, debt, and revenue composition in predicting local fiscal distress.

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The intent of this research is determine the extent to which selfreported measures of fiscal condition are consistent with commonly identified measures of fiscal condition using secondary financial data. While the field of government finance has amassed a lengthy list of research on fiscal condition and fiscal stress assessment, there remains a gap in the research on the extent to which practitioners' perceptions of fiscal stress are consistent with such measures. Our results suggest that there is limited evidence of a relationship between self-reported and objective measures of fiscal condition.

Though the fiscal slack literature has advanced over the past decade, more research is needed for a systematic understanding of the determinants and uses of fiscal reserves at the local level. This paper reviews theory and empirical evidence on the determinants of municipal fiscal reserves offers a conceptual framework for analyzing fiscal reserves accumulation and tests a series of hypotheses using a panel of 2007–2012 financial data for 145 U.S. cities from 21 states. Generalized least squares models show that unassigned general fund balances and unrestricted net assets are positively associated with general fund surpluses in the previous year and with local household incomes, while not being related to measures of fiscal risk, revenue effort, and voter characteristics. Overall, the findings suggest a relatively stronger influence of the capacity to save than the need to save on local fiscal reserves.