Home rule and municipal revenue stability: New evidence from Texas

Pengju Zhang and Phuong Nguyen‐Hoang

Public Budgeting & Finance, 2023, vol. 43, issue 1, 38-60

Abstract: Scholars have long debated whether home rule powers help improve municipal financial well‐being; however, a consensus has yet to be reached. This study advances the home rule literature by causally estimating the impact of home rule in Texas on municipal revenue stability. To accomplish this, we employed a difference‐in‐differences estimator coupled with event‐study specifications on a 40‐year‐long panel data set. This approach revealed strong empirical evidence that cities adopting a home rule charter had a significant reduction in the probability of experiencing revenue decline. This finding remained robust with multiple measures of revenue change, an alternative sample, and different model specifications. Moreover, we found that home rule cities’ revenue stability was likely to come from their increase in property taxes.

Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/pbaf.12332

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:pbudge:v:43:y:2023:i:1:p:38-60

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0275-1100

Access Statistics for this article

Public Budgeting & Finance is currently edited by Philip Joyce and William Simonsen

More articles in Public Budgeting & Finance from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().