Suchergebnisse

States use local-option taxes to promote local revenue diversification and improve local fiscal health. However, many sub-state governments wait a long time before adopting local-option taxes or do not adopt them at all, which seems puzzling or even irrational upon first glance. This paper uses the localoption meals tax in Massachusetts as a case study to examine the factors that affect the timing of local adoptions. It finds significant positive results for adoption by neighboring municipalities, which are robust to a variety of specifications, neighbor definitions, and weighting matrices. The adoption hazard also increases if a municipality faces greater fiscal stress, such as being more constrained by a property tax limitation or receiving a larger cut in state aid. In addition, the form of local government, size of the meals tax base, and ability to export the tax to non-residents are important factors.

After being sued for inequity and inadequacy in school funding, many states have reformed their education aid policies. Using Connecticut as an example, this paper shows how to design a state education aid formula that can effectively address funding inequity and inadequacy while taking political feasibility into account. It first develops a measure of the gap between education cost and revenue capacity, both of which are estimated using school district characteristics that are outside the direct control of local officials at any given point in time. It then uses each district's cost-capacity gap to evaluate the state's existing education aid distribution. This paper shows that while larger-gap districts, on average, receive greater amounts of state aid per pupil under Connecticut's existing distributions, significant inequity and inadequacy remain. This paper proposes, as a potential solution, a gap-based formula that allocates state aid to close the cost-capacity gaps. The formula includes tools such as minimum and maximum levels of aid to increase its political appeal. The research method and the formula design that this paper presents are sufficiently general and flexible to be adapted easily and applied to other states.