Special Districts and Local Government Debt: An Analysis of “Old Northwest Territory” States

Faulk, Dagney; Killian, Larita J.

doi:10.1111/pbaf.12122

Cited by 21 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…This is not generally how the recent literature views the relationship between debt limits and special districts. Faulk and Killian (2017) examine the linkage between special districts and debt and conceptualize their analysis through a circumvention argument similar to Sbragia (1996). They find evidence that an increase in the number of special districts is associated with more aggregate local government debt in five states.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Usage of Specialized Service Delivery: Evidence from Contiguous Counties

Goodman

2018

Publius: The Journal of Federalism

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This study exploits exogenous policy discontinuities along state borders to estimate the influence of differences in local autonomy on the usage of special districts in U.S. counties. Using forty years of data, this analysis compares counties on either side of state borders where local autonomy differs and finds little to no evidence that negative changes in local autonomy leads to increased utilization of special districts. This study suggests that some prior literature may overstate the importance of local autonomy in local service delivery.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Usage of Specialized Service Delivery: Evidence from Contiguous Counties

Goodman

2018

Publius: The Journal of Federalism

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“…The current literature on local government debt mainly focuses on its various influencing factors: globalization (Kim et al [34]); monetary (Andolfatto and Martin [35]); the number of special districts in a county (Faulk and Killian [36]); corruption (Liu et al [37]); fiscal policy (Cassou et al [38]); intergovernmental transfers (Lu and Zhong [39]); local governments' behavior (Li and Liang [40]); taxes (Kopczewska et al [41]); etc.…”

Section: Local Government Debt and Environmental Pollutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Research on Financial Pressure, Poverty Governance, and Environmental Pollution in China

Zhang

Zhao

2018

Sustainability

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The traditional environmental governance theory attributes pollution to the result of market failure, but ignores the institution-level factors and the possibility of government failure. Using provincial panel data from 2001 to 2016 in China, and by drawing impulse response function graphs and building PVAR models, this paper studies the financial pressure and poor governance effect on environmental pollution. Financial pressure represents fiscal decentralization and debt pressure. The study finds that the increase of fiscal autonomy brings about the reduction of various types of pollutant emissions; the expansion of the scale of government debt causes very large pressure on the local governments to repay their debts and exacerbates environmental pollution in order to obtain debt repayment funds. For a long time, there was indeed a phenomenon in China in which the goal of reducing poverty was achieved at the cost of the environment. However, since 2012, the reduction of the poverty-stricken population has brought about a good trend of reducing emissions of various types of pollutants. There are no "PPE vicious circles" and "environmental traps" in China. There has been no contradiction between poverty reduction and the green development strategy implementation since 2012. There is a win-win trend in the process of environmental protection and poverty governance in China.

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“…These guarantees do not show up as debt in our data at the city level. Faulk and Killian (2017) show empirically that having more special districts (and the Harrisburg Authority is classified as one of these) is positively correlated with increased local government debt in four of the five states they consider, which suggests this type of behavior is not unique. Note: Changes are log differences relative to 1986 except for Chicago, which is relative to 1987; circles denote periods of acute fiscal stress such as defaults, bankruptcies, or emergency manager takeovers (the last only for Flint); triangles denote acute fiscal stress periods that occur after 2011; "other cities" is not the universe of cities but covers 64% to 74% of the U.S. population over the time range; fiscal variables are in 2010 dollars per person; the interquartile range is given by the shaded area.…”

Section: A Case Study Of Default and Financial Distressmentioning

confidence: 86%

On Regional Borrowing, Default, and Migration

Gordon¹,

Guerrón‐Quintana²

2019

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Migration plays a key role in city finances with every new entrant reducing debt per person and every exit increasing it. We study the interactions between regional borrowing, migration, and default from empirical, theoretical, and quantitative perspectives. Empirically, we document that in-migration rates are positively correlated with deficits, that many cities appear to be at or near state-imposed borrowing limits, and that defaults can occur after booms or busts in productivity and population. Theoretically, we show that migration creates an externality that results in over-borrowing, and our quantitative model is able to rationalize many features of the data because of it. Counterfactuals reveal (1) Detroit should have deleveraged in the financial crisis to avoid default; (2) a return to the high-interest rate environment prevailing in the 1990s has only small long-run effects on city finances; and (3) anticipated bailouts double default rates.

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Special Districts and Local Government Debt: An Analysis of “Old Northwest Territory” States

Cited by 21 publications

References 23 publications

Usage of Specialized Service Delivery: Evidence from Contiguous Counties

Usage of Specialized Service Delivery: Evidence from Contiguous Counties

Research on Financial Pressure, Poverty Governance, and Environmental Pollution in China

On Regional Borrowing, Default, and Migration

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