Jonathan B. Justice - Böcker

Handbook of Local Government Fiscal Health reinvigorates the debate surrounding the monitoring, reporting, assessing, and managing of local government fiscal stress, bankruptcy, and state takeovers. It provides both a solid conceptual basis for understanding the sources and causes behind local government fiscal stress and crisis, as well as tools for monitoring, reporting, and addressing such crises. Based on theoretical frameworks as well as empirical evidence and case studies, this book also addresses such issues as the impact of GASB 34 and GASB 45 on the assessment of policies that address fiscal stress and crisis.Ideal for students of Public Policy and Public Administration, Handbook of Local Government Fiscal Health seeks to both advance the state of the field in terms of research and frameworks around fiscal stress in local government as well as provide an assessment of the tools, monitoring practices, and state and local policies that are used to address situations of fiscal stress.Key Features:•Gathers current thinking and research on the topic for use by academics and students, and updates classic works on fiscal stress and fiscal distress by Terry Clark, Charles Levine, and others.•Serves as a desk reference for practitioners, especially now that the topic of fiscal health is again taking center stage.•Provides comprehensive coverage of the many environmental and organizational factors influencing fiscal health, as well as the full range of concerns and concepts relevant to defining and measuring fiscal health.

This book examines the interplay of professional norms and political accountability in the process of making decisions about whether, how, and how much debt state and local governments should incur. The careful analysis of accountability in actual decisions, focusing particularly on whether and how individual and collective decision-making behavior responds to general (stipulated) norms and situational (negotiated) expectations in their broader social contexts, is a familiar approach in the study of management and public organizations generally, but has not been extensively applied to this area of public financial decision making. Political economists, especially those identified with the public-choice approach, have done extensive macro-level normative and theoretical analysis of public debt, but not in an empirically rich fashion. This book therefore constitutes a missing link that uses analyses of selected cases to advance conceptual understandings of organizational accountability spaces in general, and decisions to incur public indebtedness and the implications of those decisions specifically, by examining the intersection of the macro, meso, and micro levels of expectations for and practices of public financial decision making.