IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedbwp/14-11.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Smoothing state tax revenues over the business cycle: gauging fiscal needs and opportunities

Author

Listed:
  • Yolanda Kodrzycki

Abstract

During the two most recent U.S. recessions in 2001 and in 2007?2009, state governments experienced an unusually high degree of fiscal stress due to increased revenue cyclicality. Expanding upon the aggregate evidence, this paper explores the degree to which individual states have experienced fluctuating tax receipts over the business cycle. The findings provide state policymakers with information to better understand the extent and causes of this tax revenue cyclicality and, in the context of balanced budget requirements, the efficacy of alternative measures that might be employed to smooth the sensitivity of state resources to economic conditions.

Suggested Citation

  • Yolanda Kodrzycki, 2014. "Smoothing state tax revenues over the business cycle: gauging fiscal needs and opportunities," Working Papers 14-11, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedbwp:14-11
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/wp/wp2014/wp1411.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Steven M. Sheffrin, 2004. "State Budget Deficit Dynamics and the California Debacle," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 18(2), pages 205-226, Spring.
    2. Congressional Budget Office, 2011. "Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007," Reports 42729, Congressional Budget Office.
    3. Christian Gonzalez & Arik Levinson, 2003. "State Rainy Day Funds and the State Budget Crisis 2002-?," Working Papers gueconwpa~03-03-05, Georgetown University, Department of Economics.
    4. Congressional Budget Office, 2011. "Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007," Reports 42729, Congressional Budget Office.
    5. Congressional Budget Office, 2011. "Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007," Reports 42729, Congressional Budget Office.
    6. Donald Bruce & William F. Fox & M.H. Tuttle, 2006. "Tax Base Elasticities: A Multi-State Analysis of Long-Run and Short-Run Dynamics," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 73(2), pages 315-341, October.
    7. Jonathan A. Parker & Annette Vissing-Jorgensen, 2010. "The Increase in Income Cyclicality of High-Income Households and Its Relation to the Rise in Top Income Shares," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 41(2 (Fall)), pages 1-70.
    8. Clemens, Jeffrey, 2013. "State Fiscal Adjustment During Times of Stress: Possible Causes of the Severity and Composition of Budget Cuts," MPRA Paper 55921, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    9. Howard Chernick & Cordelia Reimers & Jennifer Tennant, 2014. "Tax structure and revenue instability: the Great Recession and the states," IZA Journal of Labor Policy, Springer;Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA), vol. 3(1), pages 1-22, December.
    10. Jennifer Weiner, 2011. "How does New Hampshire do it?: an analysis of spending and revenues in the absence of a broad-based income or sales tax," New England Public Policy Center Research Report 11-1, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
    11. James R. Hines Jr., 2010. "State Fiscal Policies and Transitory Income Fluctuations," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 41(2 (Fall)), pages 313-350.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. David Cashin & Jamie Lenney & Byron Lutz & William Peterman, 2018. "Fiscal policy and aggregate demand in the USA before, during, and following the Great Recession," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 25(6), pages 1519-1558, December.
    2. Maria O. Kakaulina, 2021. "Projected shortfall in personal income tax revenues of regional governments in Russia due to the COVID-19 pandemic," Journal of Tax Reform, Graduate School of Economics and Management, Ural Federal University, vol. 7(1), pages 39-54.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Jeffrey Thompson, 2012. "Raising Revenue from High-Income Households: Should States Continue to Place the Lowest Tax Rates on Those with the Highest Incomes?," Published Studies revenue_peri_march5, Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
    2. Daniele Coen‐Pirani, 2021. "Geographic Mobility And Redistribution," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 62(3), pages 921-952, August.
    3. Linda McCarthy, 2015. "Something New or More of the Same in the Bidding Wars for Big Business?," Growth and Change, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 46(2), pages 153-171, June.
    4. Elena Deskoska & Jana Vlčková, 2018. "The Role of Technological Change in Income Inequality in the United States," Acta Oeconomica Pragensia, Prague University of Economics and Business, vol. 2018(1), pages 47-66.
    5. Robert Kaestner & Darren Lubotsky, 2016. "Health Insurance and Income Inequality," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 30(2), pages 53-78, Spring.
    6. Timothy Smeeding & Jonathan Latner, 2015. "PovcalNet, WDI and ‘All the Ginis’: a critical review," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 13(4), pages 603-628, December.
    7. John Komlos, 2016. "Growth of Income and Welfare in the U.S. 1979-2011," CESifo Working Paper Series 5880, CESifo.
    8. Yan Lau & Harvey S. Rosen, 2015. "Are Universities Becoming More Unequal?," NBER Working Papers 21432, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    9. Lisa A. Robinson & James K. Hammitt & Richard J. Zeckhauser, 2016. "Attention to Distribution in U.S. Regulatory Analyses," Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 10(2), pages 308-328.
    10. Nicholas Henry, 2022. "How Public Administrators Inadvertently Helped Get Donald J. Trump Elected President: The Great Recession, the Housing Crisis, and the Failure of Public Policy," Public Organization Review, Springer, vol. 22(4), pages 1325-1342, December.
    11. Giusto, Andrea, 2014. "Adaptive learning and distributional dynamics in an incomplete markets model," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 40(C), pages 317-333.
    12. Jenny Gordon, 2016. "Australia's Productivity: Some Insights from Productivity Analysis," Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 3(2), pages 173-186, May.
    13. Zhao, Bo, 2016. "Saving for a rainy day: Estimating the needed size of U.S. state budget stabilization funds," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 61(C), pages 130-152.
    14. Philip Armour & Richard V. Burkhauser & Jeff Larrimore, 2013. "Deconstructing Income and Income Inequality Measures: A Crosswalk from Market Income to Comprehensive Income," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 103(3), pages 173-177, May.
    15. Karen Davtyan, 2016. "“The Distributive Effects of Conventional and Unconventional Monetary Policies”," IREA Working Papers 201606, University of Barcelona, Research Institute of Applied Economics, revised Apr 2016.
    16. Ravenna, Federico & Vincent, Nicolas, 2014. "Inequality and debt in a model with heterogeneous agents," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 123(2), pages 177-182.
    17. Mr. John Silvia & Mr. Lorenz Kueng & Mr. Olivier Coibion & Mr. Yuriy Gorodnichenko, 2012. "Innocent Bystanders? Monetary Policy and Inequality in the U.S," IMF Working Papers 2012/199, International Monetary Fund.
    18. Christina Anselmann & Hagen M. Kr�mer, 2015. "Income inequality and top incomes: some recent empirical developments with a focus on Germany," International Review of Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 29(6), pages 770-786, November.
    19. Olga Zakrevskaya & Sharon Mastracci, 2013. "Differential Effects of the Great Recession by Household Type," Challenge, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 56(6), pages 87-114.
    20. Sean E. Mulholland, 2019. "Stratification by regulation: Are bootleggers and Baptists biased?," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 180(1), pages 105-130, July.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    state tax policy; revenue cyclicality; tax volatility; individual income tax;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H2 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue
    • H7 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fedbwp:14-11. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Spozio (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbbous.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.