Intergovernmental Costs of Political Gridlock: Local Government Cash Flow Smoothing during State Budgetary Delays

Lang (Kate) Yang

Public Finance Review, 2020, vol. 48, issue 1, 102-134

Abstract: Political gridlock in state legislature often leads to a failure in adopting a budget by the start of a fiscal year. This article examines the intergovernmental implication of late state budgets, specifically the cash management problem faced by localities during the stalemate. Without legislative appropriations, the state government could delay expected transfers and payments to localities. Late intergovernmental transfers may force localities to smooth out cash flow for continued service provision through short-term borrowing. Using municipal bond market data, this article finds that when the state budget is late, the average locality’s likelihood of issuing short-term debt increases by 61 percent among those with end-of-fiscal-year short-term debt outstanding experience, and the amount of debt issuance increases by 76 percent. As short-term debt carries interest costs, state’s political gridlock and policy inactions impose direct costs on local governments.

Keywords: late budget; political gridlock; municipal bond; intergovernmental relations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1091142119875424 (text/html)

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:sae:pubfin:v:48:y:2020:i:1:p:102-134

DOI: 10.1177/1091142119875424

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Public Finance Review
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().