Panel:
Policy, Politics, and Comparative Governance of Regional and Local Borrowing
(Public and Non-Profit Management and Finance)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
The panel offers a range of empirical analyses on the intersection between policies and politics of governance in the debt management function at regional and local levels. The first paper evaluates critical fiscal reforms that enabled city governments from three countries with emerging capital markets to gain access to new borrowing options. It offers important policy lessons to other nations who are undertaking similar efforts both in developed and developing contexts. The second paper uses computation text analysis techniques to extract organizational resilience measures from recommended budget narratives of California counties. It then investigates the impact of resilience signals on capital market outcomes for county governments. The last two papers assess the role of partisanship and party politics on debt policy decisions and outcomes at the local level in Mexico and the Russian Federation, respectively. The former study finds that electoral cycles in Mexico shape both the timing and type of debt at the local levels. The latter paper empirically evaluates whether patron-client authoritarian governance systems channel largess to regional and municipal governments that are most proximate to the ruling elite in the federal government. All of the papers are relevant to debt policy and fiscal governance at the regional and local levels of analyses.
