The Urban Economy

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68901/2/10.1177_107808746600100407.pd

Financing the Metropolis

Struggling to keep their heads above water, cities are trying every means from increased real-estate taxes to off-track betting to squeeze all the dollars they can. In FINANCING THE METROPOLIS, noted economists and urbanologists team up to examine this ailing patient. They decide, surprisingly, that the outlook is not so hopeless as many believe. Among prognoses: "Local governments are not broke; they just think they are;" and "The current fiscal crisis of our cities is a political problem, not an economic one." A lengthy bibliography is appended.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68646/2/10.1177_109114217300100107.pd

Modelling the US Federal Spending Process: Overview and Implications

The object of study is the US Federal budget process - an institutional process of increasing prominence in US and world affairs - which is unique in generating quantitative data for scholarly research. The authors first outline their rigorous, but simple, econometric models of how budget decisions are made, coordinated, and implemented and then trace the implications of their high-inertia view of the process for the US economic cycle. They propound a presidential and Congressional ambition model of current and postwar cyclical economic difficulties, including stagflation, in terms of a macroeconomic model of the US economy in which federal governmental expenditure is endogenous. The chapter concludes with speculation on the disastrous consequences for society of the growth of a sluggishly adaptable bureaucratic process operating in a rapidly changing economic and social environment

University centers for the study of public policy: Organizational viability

The central problems of creating and maintaining a university center for the study of public policy stem from the inherently interdisciplinary nature of the policy design process and the tensions in academic circles between “pure” and “applied” research.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45446/1/11077_2005_Article_BF01404904.pd

The Political Economy of US Military Spending

The causes of the dramatic rise in military spending in the post-war era have been the subject of much political and academic controversy. No extant formulation seems to provide a compelling explanation of the dynamics involved in the levels of, and rates of change in, such spending. In light of this, the authors develop a new model, based mainly on a political-business cycle argument, to account for these dynamics. The basic proposition in this model is that variations in national defense spending arise from political considerations which are related to real and desired conditions within the national economy. Applying this model to the experience of the United States 1948-1976, the authors show that it has a large measure of empirical validity. If one removes the effects of war-time mobilization, it is clear that for the United States the principal driving forces in military spending dynamics were (1) the perceived utility of such spending in stabilizing aggregate demand, (2) the political or electoral value of the perceived economic effects arising out of such spending, and (3) the pressures of institutional-constituency demands.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68958/2/10.1177_002234337901600202.pd

On the Occasion of his Inauguration as the Ninth President of Georgia Institute of Technology

This document is a draft version of John Patrick Crecine's inaugural address as the ninth president of the Georgia Institute of Technology

A Computer Simulation Model of Municipal Resource Allocation

This report contains a description of a particular kind of governmental decision making “ the decisional behavior connected with municipal operating budgets. The theory is stated in the language of a computer program. The model of governmental problem solving is applied to the cities of Cleveland, Detroit, and Pittsburgh. The Model, with appropriate parameter estimates, is used to reproduce operating budget decisions in the three cities* In addition various naive models are tested and then compared with our decision Model (Section 6). Analysis of model residuals (Section 7) and a sensitivity analysis of some model parameters (Section 10) • is used to study "unprogrammed" aspects of budgetary behavior. The formal Model (presented in Section 4) is also related to various theories of individual and organizational behavior in Section 9. The behavioral antecedents of the model are discussed in Section 5* Implications o r the study for political research are touched on in Section 11 and our positive model forms the basis for a normative discussion of municipal resource allocation in Section 12.</p