Quantitative public financial management research focused on local governments is limited by the absence of a common database for empirical analysis. While the U.S. Census Bureau distributes government finance data that some scholars have utilized, the arduous process of collecting, interpreting, and organizing the data has led its adoption to be prohibitive and inconsistent. In this article we offer a single, coherent resource that contains all of the government financial data from 1967-2012, uses easy to understand natural-language variable names, and will be extended when new data is available.
Gore’s article explores the determinants and implications of cash reserves. Here, we replicate Gore’s finding of a positive relationship between environmental uncertainty and municipal fund balances using the same data, the same specifications, and the same econometric software. We also test the robustness of her original findings by adding years and observations. We show that the empirical results reported in Gore’s article are largely replicable and that its results are robust to substantial data extensions. Nevertheless, we believe that Gore reaches normative conclusions that municipalities hold “excess cash reserves,” which are not justified by her empirical results.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.