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.

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.

This paper examines the impact of the form of government and state-imposed property tax limits on municipal finance. We suggest that municipal revenues and expenditures are determined concurrently and estimate revenue and expenditure functions as simultaneous equations. We use the instrumental variable approach and fixed effects to address revenue and expenditure endogeneity. By testing the model on a cross-section of rich municipal data for fiscal year 2002, we find evidence that revenues and expenditures are simultaneously determined, that potentially binding state-imposed property tax limits effectively restrict local revenues and that the form of government is a significant predictor of local expenditures.

This study uses data from a survey of female labor migrants from three Central Asian countries – Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan – in Moscow, Russia, to examine factors that influence these women's plans to return to their home countries. The conceptual framework considers three types of factors of migrants' attachment to the host society – economic incorporation, civil inclusion, and social connectedness – while also accounting for migrants' ties to their homelands. The results of multivariate analyses point to the importance of sector and type of employment, income, legal status, experience of ethnically motivated harassment, and social ties to adults relatives and friends in the host society in shaping return plans. In contrast, connections in the home country do not appear to influence the likelihood of having plans to return. These findings are contextualized within the political, socioeconomic, and ethnocultural reality of the post‐Soviet world and related to the cross‐national scholarship on return migration.

This paper examines the relationship between annexation and municipal finance and addresses a gap in the literature by studying the role of revenue structure and fiscal constraints. Using a large national sample of urban municipalities, the analysis shows that territorial expansion by itself does not influence municipal fiscal outcomes with the exception of large single parcels annexations which increase spending. We also observe negative effects of population changes on revenues and spending per capita. Since population changes typically accompany annexation, we conclude that annexing cities tend to use their added tax base to spread the revenue burden more widely rather than to increase the size of government. An important implication of this study is that state‐imposed fiscal constraints do not hamper annexation success and that comprehensive urban development policies may be needed to accommodate growth and development after annexation.