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During the Great Recession, the housing bubble took much of the blame for bringing the American economy to its knees, but commercial real estate also experienced its own boom-and-bust in the same time period. In Chicago, for example, law firms and corporate headquarters abandoned their historic downtown office buildings for the millions of brand-new square feet that were built elsewhere in the central business district. What causes construction booms like this, and why do they so often leave a glut of vacant space and economic distress in their wake? In From Boom to Bubble, Rachel Weber debunks the idea that booms occur only when cities are growing and innovating. Instead, she argues, even in cities experiencing employment and population decline, developers rush to erect new office towers and apartment buildings when they have financial incentives to do so. Focusing on the main causes of overbuilding during the early 2000s, Weber documents the case of Chicago's "Millennial Boom," showing that the Loop's expansion was a response to global and local pressures to produce new assets. An influx of cheap cash, made available through the use of complex financial instruments, helped transform what started as a boom grounded in modest occupant demand into a speculative bubble, where pricing and supply had only tenuous connections to the market. Innovative and compelling, From Boom to Bubble is an unprecedented historical, sociological, and geographic look at how property markets change and fail--and how that affects cities.

How do the socially reproductive functions of local government fare within municipalities that adopt "entrepreneurial" economic development practices? This article examines the case of tax increment financing (TIF), a quintessentially entrepreneurial strategy whose use has significant fiscal implications for the overlapping taxing jurisdictions that provide these functions. Statistical analysis of TIF's impact on the finances of school districts in Cook County, Illinois, reveals that municipal use of TIF depletes the property tax revenues of schools during the lifespan of the TIF district but that a portion of the budget shortfalls are relieved by increases in state school aid. Entrepreneurial policies can create conflict between taxing bodies unless higher levels of government take on some of the fiscal burden of these more redistributive functions.

Based primarily on original interviews, this article compares the treatment of gender as an ergonomic consideration within military and commercial cockpit design. Both defense and civilian cockpits have traditionally been built to engineering specifications based on male anthropometry and tend to embody a physical bias against women and smaller- statured men. However, the design of defense aircraft has been more highly regulated, and more efforts have been taken to ensure that a larger pool of otherwise eligible female pilots are accommodated by future systems, such as the Joint Primary Aircraft Training System (JPATS). The article demonstrates how and why the interests of women pilots could prevail in the traditionally male preserve of the military.

Contemporary legal doctrine holds that corporate managers have obligations, first and foremost, to maximize profits for their shareholders. This doctrine is based on the assumption that shareholders alone bear the financial risks and contribute the equity necessary for production. But what if other groups contribute assets and also risk losing their investments? What if other groups actually shelter shareholders from financial risks? Such is the case with the nation's prime defense contractors. By examining the case of defense contracting, where the federal government and, indirectly, the taxpayers assume most of the risks and costs of producing weaponry, Rachel Weber critiques the assumptions underlying our system of corporate governance.The Department of Defense provides contracts for billions of dollars, specialized components and facilities, interest subsidies, tax breaks, and regulatory relief. These public contributions make the record shareholder returns and executive compensation packages of the early 1990s all the more problematic. This book follows the case of General Dynamics, the nation's largest military shipbuilder and considered a trendsetter in the industry for its explicit shareholder orientation. The behavior of contractors like General Dynamics in the post-Cold War period raises serious concerns about the private stewardship of public funds. How can the government make contractors accountable to other public interests? In Swords into Dow Shares Rachel Weber offers some original suggestions for redirecting defense resources to foster innovation, decrease the tax burden of military spending, and help to retain and create high-wage jobs in a civilian-industrial economy.

AbstractOur fiscal analysis of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) from 1990 to 2018 contributes to a growing scholarship on the financialization of urban governance. We advance the concept of 'recursive austerity' to show how devolution and cuts at higher scales push local governments into the hands of both growth and debt machines. The use of short‐term and variable‐rate debt to pay for capital projects causes entrepreneurial and austerity strategies to chafe against their limitations and contradictions, which begets more austerity and structural dependence on credit markets. Faced with deficits, CPS undertook crippling austerity measures, such as staffing cuts, pension holidays and school closures, which disproportionately harmed Black students, households, teachers and neighborhoods. We explain how CPS moved from a voluntary high‐leverage strategy to finance capital projects to endemic debt dependency, characterized by habitual borrowing to refinance old loans and sustain operations. We argue that CPS's debt trap and recurring budget 'crises' are the outcomes of the fiscal management decisions it made with investment banks and the City of Chicago, and not only the result of secular trends such as declining enrollments.

In addition to cuts in social programs, the Great Recession also affected government expenditures once considered less vulnerable to austerity, such as economic development. Using a comparative case study approach, we examine economic development policies and practices in two cities, sampled for similar economic and fiscal conditions: Fresno, California and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We find that declining state support and local autonomy weakened the municipal economic development function while leaving entrepreneurial logics largely intact. In the face of significant economic and fiscal stress after the Great Recession, both Fresno and Milwaukee remained committed to conventional approaches to stimulating private development, even as their capacity to do so was severely constrained by state pre-emption and cuts in intergovernmental aid. The elimination of city-controlled economic development programs, rescaling of incentives, and state-imposed regulatory restrictions provide a counter-narrative to those claiming that a "new localism" enhanced the role of cities as economic actors after the crisis.

We identify the factors correlated with the use of economic development incentives after the Great Recession of 2007–2009 to determine the presence of entrepreneurial development regimes. We utilize a unique dataset that combines information on incentives (tax increment financing districts and selected tax abatements and business assistance) with economic, fiscal, and political characteristics for all municipalities in the largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan. These three states bordering Lake Michigan share similar histories and settings, thus targeting the research focus on the key attributes of interest. Our empirical results demonstrate substantial dissimilarity between incentive types and across states, most likely due to policy structures and reforms at the state level that encourage different municipal development regimes. Whereas municipalities, particularly larger ones, continue to use tax abatements, exemptions, and credits to pursue employment growth, the municipalities gravitating toward tax increment financing tend to be suburbs with low unemployment rates and relatively highly educated residents, and not places with greater employment density or manufacturing employment.