The University of Illinois-Chicago’s new Government Finance Research Center (College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs) has announced that it will continue the spring public finance miniconference series. The conference will be Thursday May 2 to Friday May 3 in 2019 and will take place at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

From the call:

Although the Great Recession ended a decade ago, many city governments have yet to see their revenue streams return to pre-recessionary levels. In addition, local governments across the United States, as well as many states, are grappling with the cost of legacy liabilities, meeting service demands, creating sustainable fiscal systems, and ensuring efficiency and equity in the design of fiscal models and programs. As such, there is concern about how well equipped state and local governments are to weather the next economic downturn, which many market watchers are predicting. The field of public finance is also being challenged to think about these issues in conjunction with concerns of social justice, intergenerational equity, place-based equity, and income and other disparities.

This conference will focus on topics that we think will be front and center in the policy debate in the coming years. We invite proposals for papers that examine these and other policy issues at the national and subnational levels in domestic and international contexts utilizing a variety of methodological approaches. Proposals will be reviewed and competitively selected.

Possible areas include, but are not limited to:
• Preparation for the next financial downturn
• Legacies of austerity
• Constraints on fiscal policy behavior and service provision
• Gendered or raced impacts of particular tax or revenue-generating policies
• Cost and consequences of deferred maintenance
• Changing fiscal fortunes of suburban communities

The deadline for proposals is February 1, 2019, see the call for further details.

This is the 5th of an informal miniconference series, which SPEA of Indiana University and AYS of Georgia State University have alternately hosted since 2015, so it is great to see the line-up expand to include UIC, and hopefully that continues.

Here are the most recent previous programs:

Spring 2018 at GSU: “Public Finance and The New Economy”
Spring 2017 at IU: “Applied Research in Public Finance“