Municipal revenues: data dilemmas, structures, and trends

This chapter serves two purposes for municipal finance researchers. First it introduces the broad trends in sources of city revenues, with special attention paid to the disruption produced by the Great Recession. It is demonstrated that real per capita revenue trends, both in the long term and with respect to the Great Recession, have looked quite different for the largest cities as measured by population than for the remainder of the cities. For property taxes, the largest revenue source, cities below the median in population size have grown rapidly since the Great Recession to actually reach parity with the largest one percent of cities that have stagnated in property taxes since that time. We follow these stylized facts with important caveats on data sources with practical implications for researchers. Alternative data sources produce very different pictures of a given city, and this is partially the consequence of data source purpose.