The NTA has announced winners for their various awards to be presented at the upcoming November meetings:

2018 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation in Government Finance and Taxation

David Schönholzer, University of California, Berkeley
Essays on State Capacity and Local Public Goods

Honorable Mention

Steven Hamilton, University of Michigan
Essays in Tax Policy Evaluation

Benjamin Hyman, The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania
Essays in Public Economics and International Trade

The Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation award recognizes exemplary dissertation research in government finance and taxation.

2018 Daniel M. Holland Medal

Michael Keen, International Monetary Fund

The Daniel M. Holland Medal recognizes outstanding contributions to the study and practice of public finance.

2018 Davie-Davis Public Service Award

Donald Kiefer, U.S. Department of the Treasury

The Davie-Davis award honors members who serve the public through the provision of expert analyses and objective advice to elected officials, other policy makers, and the general public.

2018 Steven D. Gold Award

Therese McGuire, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

The Steven D. Gold award honors professionals who have made significant contributions to state and local fiscal policy.

2018 NTJ Richard Musgrave Prize

Trevor Gallen and Casey Mulligan, “Wedges, Labor Market Behavior, and Health Insurance Coverage under the Affordable Care Act,” National Tax Journal, 71:1

The annual Richard Musgrave prize highlights the most outstanding paper published in the National Tax Journal.

2018 NTJ Referee of the Year Award

Andrew Hanson, Congressional Budget Office
Nick Turner, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

 

In preparation for ABFM’s upcoming conference in Denver, I am doing a series of profiles on the doctoral students on the job market.

Ngoc Dao (SPEA – Indiana University) is presenting “The New Federal Minimum Wage Mandates on Homecare Workers: Its Impact on Cost of Homehealth Services” in the Saturday 11:15 session on Non-Profit Finance and its Implications. Here is the abstract:

The rapid growth of the home care industry coincides with increases in the proportion of the population over 65 years of age and more likely to need assistance with basic daily activities due to illness or disability. Yet the growth in home care use has been accompanied by concerns about the quality of the care provided. Higher wages and better legal protection might improve the quality of home health care services. This study examines the 2013 Home Care Rule promulgated by the Department of Labor, which added home care workers to the groups covered under the Federal Minimum Wage Mandate with minimum hourly and overtime rates. Taking advantage of a variation in state minimum wage laws before and after the new Rule took place, I use a conventional Difference-in-Differences approach to estimate its impact on various labor outcomes including employment (extensive and intensive margin), hourly wage rates, income, and social program participation. Findings from this study suggest that there was little effect on the extensive margin (employment), but on the intensive margin, fulltime employment and worked hours decreased by 3-5%. The results also show that although wages increased substantially (8-16% depending on treatment status) among homecare workers, the Home Care Rule was ineffective in reducing the reliance on public assistance programs such as food stamp and Medicaid at least in the short-run.

Brad Heim is chairing her dissertation, which is on a variety of federal policies and their effects on social programs.

You can find Ngoc Dao’s CV here.

In preparation for ABFM’s upcoming conference in Denver, I am doing a series of profiles on the doctoral students on the job market.

Yusun Kim is a doctoral candidate in Public Administration in Syracuse University. She’ll be presenting two papers at ABFM on “How Reduction in State Mandated Medicaid Spending Affect County Fiscal Behaviors: A Study of New York Counties” and “State Aid, Regular Property Assessment, and Assessment Outcomes: Evidence from New York State.” Her dissertation is on state and local public finance topics, supervised by Yilin Hou. Here is the abstract of the medicaid paper, which is Kim’s job market paper:

This paper aims to advance our empirical understanding about local fiscal responses to an intergovernmental fiscal policy that changes the way two levels of governments share the costs of a large public social insurance program. New York State in the United States passed a legislation in 2005 to cap the growth of county-level Medicaid spending, which abruptly decreased county Medicaid outlay in relative and absolute terms. This paper exploits the discontinuity in county Medicaid outlay to analyze the impact of the relief mandate on county budgets and property tax levies. The findings include a compositional change in county spending but no change in the total budget. In response to the cap policy, counties redirect most of their revenues to other general operational expenses and public employee benefits, while they also increase spending on public safety and community college education. The results show that New York counties reduce their property tax rate by approximately 0.64 to 1 mills on average, relative to comparison counties, two years after the cap is adopted. This study also intends to fill in the gap of the literature on how local governments respond to a sudden decrease instead of an increase in the outlay of a large mandatory spending category, which could potentially lead to property tax relief.

That paper is under review at International Tax and Public Finance, and she has publication experience in the form of two co-authored publications in Global Social Policy and Population Research & Policy Review.

You can see see Yusun Kim’s CV and research interests at her website here.

In preparation for ABFM’s upcoming conference in Denver, I am doing a series of profiles on the doctoral students on the job market.

Siân Mughan (SPEA-Indiana University) is the winner of ABFM’s Michael Curro Award for best graduate student paper for her work “Budget Deficits and Revenue Extracting Activities in the Criminal Justice System.” Her presentation is in the Saturday session at 8:15. I am chair of her dissertation, which is on a variety of challenges presented by financing government with the criminal justice system.

Through FOIAs of the Indiana Court Administration, Mughan obtains a decade of trial case administrative data. She then reviews how the state’s institutional rules over the local government budget process regulate property tax levies in a way that generates structural deficits and makes non-tax revenues like criminal justice fees more valuable on a dollar-for-dollar basis than tax revenues in the public budget. This sets up key hypotheses over multiple points in the lifecycle of trial cases, starting with law enforcement agencies issuing more tickets, to courts extracting more revenue per case, to judicial changes in sentencing, and finally the aggressiveness of enforcement penalties for defendants who fail to pay their court fees on time. Her results repeatedly reveal that the more valuable criminal justice fee revenue becomes under state rules, the more revenue aggressive the local criminal justice system becomes. I nominated her paper for the Curro award, and I think her work is a contender for the most important paper in public finance this year.

Other chapters of her dissertation explore the effects on politically vulnerable groups and the opening of municipal courts as a revenue generator. In addition to that paper, Siân has several author interesting articles:

• A solo-authored revise-and-resubmit at Public Administration Review on the topic of local government consolidation.
• A publication in Economic Development Quarterly which uses the synthetic control method to estimate the impact of Ohio’s repeal of the tangible personal property tax on manufacturing employment.
• A publication in Public Finance Review on how mass property reappraisals introduce fiscal illusion into local government.
• A paper under review at Journal of Public Administration Research & Theory on the use of Civil Asset Forfeiture in the states.

You can see Siân’s website here.

In preparation for ABFM’s upcoming conference in Denver, I am doing a series of profiles on the doctoral students on the job market.

Iuliia (Yulia) Shybalkina (Maxwell-Syracuse) will be presenting “What Makes Public Participation More “Pro-Poor”? Evidence from Participatory Budgeting” in the 8:15am Friday session. The associated article has a revise-and-resubmit with Public Budgeting and Finance, here is the abstract:

We attempt to measure the effects of participatory budgeting on the allocation of capital funding among areas of different income levels within New York City council districts. We created a longitudinal, geocoded dataset of all projects funded with council member capital discretionary money over nine years. We employ a difference-in-differences design, which compares changes in the allocation of funding in adopting districts before and after the adoption of participatory budgeting to changes over the same period among a control group consisting of later adopters. We find that, on average, adopting districts increase funding in the next to the lowest income census tracts more than the control group, but there is no evidence of participatory budgeting redirecting funds to the lowest income census tracts.

Her dissertation is “Does Citizen Engagement in Public Finance Administration Support or Undermine Equity?” and is chaired by Robert Bifulco. She has a second job market paper that similarly looks at participatory budgeting in New York City, this time looking the role of “dedicated and involved” public officials in helping low income neighborhoods obtain a larger share of capital projects. Her other work on property assessment appeals demonstrate her skills as a mixed-methods researcher.

Her profile page at Syracuse is found here.

In preparation for ABFM’s upcoming conference in Denver, I am doing a series of profiles on the doctoral students on the job market.

JoEllen Pope (UNC-Charlotte, Public Policy) is presenting “Isn’t a Flood a Rainy Day? Does the Political nature of Disasters Affect the Use of States’ Rainy Day Funds?” in the 9:45 session on Thursday. This paper is under review at Social Science Quarterly, and is viewable here. She has an MPA with a concentration in Emergency Management, is a practicing CPA, and a firefighter. Her dissertation, supervised by Dr. Suzanne M. Leland, is titled Flooded with Complexity: Do Organizational Structural Complexity, Coordination, and Managerial Discretion Impact Natural Disaster Preparedness?.  She has a publication forthcoming on political influences over election administration expenditures in the American Journal of Political Science and another three papers under review. Here is the abstract of the paper being presented at ABFM:

Abstract
Objectives: To determine if state lawmakers exploit Rainy Day Funds for political purposes in the aftermath of disasters rather than their intended purpose of combatting state economic downturns.

Methods: This research draws from multiple state-level data sources to construct a panel data set from 1992-2010.

Results: Disaster damage, relief funds, and politics all influence the level of states’ rainy day funds. We also find that politicians will tend to draw down the RDF balance more as disaster damages increases when it is an election year and the same party holds party control of the governor and legislature.

Conclusion: These findings are consistent with representative democracy and institutional theory, which argue that a state government’s action is comprised of a collection of choices made by individuals and those individuals seek to maximize their utility (re-election). This in turn produces political as opposed to more efficient decision-making in determining the use of RDFs.

Find more of JoEllen Pope’s research, teaching, and interests see her website here.

In preparation for ABFM’s upcoming conference in Denver, I am doing a series of profiles on the doctoral students on the job market.

Trang Hoang (School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences – University of Texas at Dallas) has titles in several sessions:

• Pension Reforms and Public Sector Turnover (with Evgenia Gorina)
• Costs of Information Asymmetry in Bond Issuance (with Gorina and Jing Wang)
• Board Structure and Pension Investment Performance: Evidence from the Common Agency Approach (with Ken Kriz).

As you would probably guess, her dissertation (supervised by Drs. Evgenia Gorina and Doug Goodman) is on managing public retirement systems. She is lead author on a paper on Public Pension Reform and Collective Bargaining in State and Local Governments in Public Administration Review. She has another paper on pension reforms with a revise and resubmit at the Journal of Public Administration Research & Theory, so she has experience with the top journals of public administration. She has another two papers under review, as well as a published book review.

You can find Trang Hoan’s school profile here.