Devolution to the subnational state and local level has increased reliance on locally raised revenue to provide basic social, infrastructural, and economic development services. We conduct multilevel regression models of local government fiscal effort (locally raised revenue normalized by population and income) of all county areas in the continental United States for the period 2002-2007. Spatial regression and geographically weighted regression are used to understand differential spatial effects of subnational state policies on local fiscal effort across counties. In contrast to conventional fiscal federalism theory, which argues local government is the developmental state, we find increased spatial inequality as expenditures driven by local need may crowd out expenditures related to growth and development. Nonmetropolitan counties and older suburbs exhibit higher local effort, while suburban outlying areas have lower effort. State rescaling requires more attention to policies of the subnational state, particularly state aid and state centralization of fiscal responsibility to ensure that both redistributive and developmental expenditures can be maintained under devolution.

We conduct an employment growth model of all US county areas for the mild recession after 9/11 and the Great Recession. We find employment growth is positively related to educational attainment and state centralisation of fiscal responsibility and negatively related to manufacturing employment. We use Geographically Weighted Regression to explore the spatial diversity of responses and find neither theories of the developmental state nor austerity urbanism adequately predict locality response to the recession. State rescaling has shifted redistributive expenditure responsibility down to the local level, crowding out developmental investments and undermining local resilience.

Policies promoting planning for aging and elder involvement in the planning process have the greatest impact on the level of community health-related services for seniors.

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Can environmental regulation promote green innovation and the productivity of cities? The “Compliance Cost” (CC) perspective and the “Porter Hypothesis” (PH) offer contrasting views, whereas the existing empirical results are inconclusive. This paper aims to highlight the roles of multifaceted government interventions, including government-to-firm subsidies, tax levies on firms, and environmental infrastructure provisions, in moderating environmental regulation for realizing PH. Based on the fixed-effects models for Chinese prefecture cities from 2005–2013, we found that environmental regulation positively impacted green innovation but negatively affected productivity. The results of moderating effects suggest that environmental regulation can better promote green innovation if it is compounded with more government-to-firm subsidies, lower firm tax burdens, and increased environmental infrastructure provisions. We further decomposed the impacts of these interventions across seven fields of green innovation and found that subsidy and tax burden relief were especially effective in facilitating more GI in the sector of transportation and alternative energy production. This paper amplifies the theoretical framework of PH by accentuating the analytical lens of multifaceted government interventions but also provides insights into how local governments can effectively design “carrot-and-stick” policies to realize PH at the city level.