Government consolidations remain highly controversial, and the proposition that consolidated governments operate more efficiently than smaller government units is a contested claim. This research evaluates the outcomes of Indiana property tax consolidation reform of 2008. It documents 19.0–27.0 percent cost savings from consolidated tax administration and estimates cost elasticities. The study finds that assessment costs are highly elastic to assessor workloads, wage levels, and the percentage of agricultural land, but not the assessment quality. Although these findings may assist other fragmented local government units in evaluating vertical consolidation proposals, they may not directly generalize to other areas of government.

Market value–based assessment systems introduce objectivity and transparency into the assessment process by partially removing assessors’ bias while benchmarking assessed values against the recently sold properties. This article explores vertical equity of Indiana’s new market value–based assessment system over a decade of 2000s including the years of the housing crisis (2008–2010). Five methods are used to assess vertical equity of the system, including locally weighted and quantile regressions. The results demonstrate a significant increase in vertical inequity during the years of the housing crisis. Assessment regressivity is particularly acute at the tails of the ratio distribution: the least expensive properties are overassessed, while the most expensive ones are underassessed. While a self-regulating assessment system is yet to be discovered, I recommend reducing the time intervals between mass reassessments and introducing independent audits for properties that are most susceptible to overassessment and underassessment to remedy vertical inequity of the property tax.

This chapter discusses the budget process for public capital investments in Ukraine, presents controversies in the current process, and offers several avenues for improvement. In doing so, the author provides a description of the country's normative capital public budgeting framework, presents the institutional setup, and tracks Ukraine's public capital expenditure trends for nearly three decades (1991-2016). The study then discusses implementation, audit, and performance issues in Ukraine's public capital expenditure management and provides recommendations. Because of the country's limited fiscal capacity as compared to its massive infrastructure needs, the author posits that Ukraine can no longer afford to delay or ignore its most pressing public capital investment needs. Because the current list of capital investment proposals is underfunded and too long, the author suggests that the government focuses on finishing strategic, high-priority public projects, while other capital spending proposals target private sector financing once it becomes more readily available.

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