IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedmsr/501.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Pay with Promises or Pay as You Go? Lessons from the Death Spiral of Detroit

Author

Listed:
  • Thomas J. Holmes
  • Lee E. Ohanian

Abstract

As part of compensation, municipal employees typically receive promises of future benefits. Motivated by the recent bankruptcy of Detroit, we develop a model of the equilibrium size of a city and use it to analyze how pay-with-promises schemes interact with city growth. The paper examines the circumstances under which a death spiral arises, where cutbacks of city services and increases in taxes lead to an exodus of residents, compounding financial distress. The model is put to work to analyze issues such as the welfare effects of having cities absorb pension risk and how unions affect the likelihood of a death spiral.

Suggested Citation

  • Thomas J. Holmes & Lee E. Ohanian, 2014. "Pay with Promises or Pay as You Go? Lessons from the Death Spiral of Detroit," Staff Report 501, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedmsr:501
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/sr/sr501.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Thomas Buchmueller & John Dinardo, 2002. "Did Community Rating Induce an Adverse Selection Death Spiral? Evidence from New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 92(1), pages 280-294, March.
    2. Marco Bassetto & Leslie McGranahan, 2009. "On the relationship between mobility, population growth, and capital spending in the United States," Working Paper Series WP-09-25, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
    3. Inman, Robert P., 1982. "Public employee pensions and the local labor budget," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 19(1), pages 49-71, October.
    4. Eaton, Jonathan & Eckstein, Zvi, 1997. "Cities and growth: Theory and evidence from France and Japan," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 27(4-5), pages 443-474, August.
    5. Barro, Robert J, 1979. "On the Determination of the Public Debt," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 87(5), pages 940-971, October.
    6. Gyourko, Joseph & Tracy, Joseph, 1989. "Local public sector rent-seeking and its impact on local land values," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 19(3), pages 493-516, August.
    7. Gyourko, Joseph & Tracy, Joseph, 1989. "On the political economy of land value capitalization and local public sector rent seeking in a Tiebout model," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 26(2), pages 152-173, September.
    8. James A. Schmitz Jr., 2005. "What Determines Productivity? Lessons from the Dramatic Recovery of the U.S. and Canadian Iron Ore Industries Following Their Early 1980s Crisis," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 113(3), pages 582-625, June.
    9. Xavier Gabaix, 1999. "Zipf's Law for Cities: An Explanation," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 114(3), pages 739-767.
    10. Dennis Epple & Katherine Schipper, 1981. "Municipal pension funding: A theory and some evidence," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 37(1), pages 141-178, January.
    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. R. Warren Anderson, 2018. "The Detroit Discontinuity," Homo Oeconomicus: Journal of Behavioral and Institutional Economics, Springer, vol. 35(3), pages 167-184, September.

    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. Crawford, Rowena & Disney, Richard, 2014. "Reform of police pensions in England and Wales," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 116(C), pages 62-72.
    2. Sprunger, Philip & Wilson, John Douglas, 1998. "Imperfectly Mobile Households and Durable Local Public Goods: Does the Capitalization Mechanism Work?," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 44(3), pages 468-492, November.
    3. Klein, Alexander & Leunig, Tim, 2013. "Gibrat’s Law and the British Industrial Revolution," CAGE Online Working Paper Series 146, Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE).
    4. Duranton, Gilles & Puga, Diego, 2014. "The Growth of Cities," Handbook of Economic Growth, in: Philippe Aghion & Steven Durlauf (ed.), Handbook of Economic Growth, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 5, pages 781-853, Elsevier.
    5. Sueli Moro & Reginaldo J. Santos, 2013. "The characteristics and evolution of the Brazilian spatial urban system: empirical evidences for the long-run, 1970-2010," Textos para Discussão Cedeplar-UFMG 474, Cedeplar, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.
    6. Sen, Hu & Chunxia, Yang & Xueshuai, Zhu & Zhilai, Zheng & Ya, Cao, 2015. "Distributions of region size and GDP and their relation," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 430(C), pages 46-56.
    7. Hasan Engin Duran & Andrzej Cieślik, 2021. "The distribution of city sizes in Turkey: A failure of Zipf’s law due to concavity," Regional Science Policy & Practice, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 13(5), pages 1702-1719, October.
    8. Daniel E. Ingberman & Robert P. Inman, 1987. "The Political Economy of Fiscal Policy," NBER Working Papers 2405, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    9. Kim, Ho Yeon, 2012. "Shrinking population and the urban hierarchy," IDE Discussion Papers 360, Institute of Developing Economies, Japan External Trade Organization(JETRO).
    10. Alexandra SCHAFFAR & Sotiris PAVLEAS, 2014. "The Evolution Of The Greek Urban Centers: 1951-2011," Region et Developpement, Region et Developpement, LEAD, Universite du Sud - Toulon Var, vol. 39, pages 87-104.
    11. Christian Düben & Melanie Krause, 2021. "Population, light, and the size distribution of cities," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 61(1), pages 189-211, January.
    12. Chen, Zhihong & Fu, Shihe & Zhang, Dayong, 2010. "Searching for the parallel growth of cities," MPRA Paper 21528, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    13. Fernando Rubiera-Morollón & Ignacio del Rosal & Alberto Díaz-Dapena, 2015. "Can large cities explain the aggregate movements of economies? Testing the ‘granular hypothesis’ for US counties," Letters in Spatial and Resource Sciences, Springer, vol. 8(2), pages 109-118, July.
    14. Goerlich Gisbert Francisco J. & Mas Ivars Matilde, 2008. "Sobre el tamaño de las ciudades en España: Dos reflexiones y una regularidad empírica," Working Papers 201079, Fundacion BBVA / BBVA Foundation.
    15. Morris A. Davis & Jonas D. M. Fisher & Toni M. Whited, 2014. "Macroeconomic Implications of Agglomeration," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 82(2), pages 731-764, March.
    16. Bowen, H. & Munandar, H. & Viaene, J.M., 2006. "Evidence and implications of zipf’s law for integrated economies," Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School Working Paper Series 2006-03, Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School.
    17. Poterba, James M., 1995. "Capital budgets, borrowing rules, and state capital spending," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 56(2), pages 165-187, February.
    18. W.A. NaudÈ & W.F. Krugell, 2003. "An Inquiry into Cities and their Role in Subnational Economic Growth in South Africa," Journal of African Economies, Centre for the Study of African Economies, vol. 12(4), pages 476-499, December.
    19. Harry P. Bowen & Haris Munandar & Jean-Marie Viaene, 2005. "Zipf's Law for Integrated Economies," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 05-048/2, Tinbergen Institute, revised 06 Feb 2007.
    20. Edward L. Glaeser & Giacomo A.M. Ponzetto & Kristina Tobio, 2010. "The Varieties of Regional Change," Working Papers 472, Barcelona School of Economics.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    City growth; Pay with promises; Death spiral; Retiree health benefits; Detroit; Defined benefit pension plans;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H75 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - State and Local Government: Health, Education, and Welfare
    • H20 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - General
    • R51 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Regional Government Analysis - - - Finance in Urban and Rural Economies
    • R23 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Household Analysis - - - Regional Migration; Regional Labor Markets; Population

    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:fedmsr:501. 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: Kate Hansel (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cfrbmus.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.