The political budget cycle theory has extensively documented how politicians manipulate policies during election years to gain an electoral advantage. This paper focuses on county sheriffs, crucial but often neglected local officials, and investigates their opportunistic political behavior during elections. Using a panel data set covering 57 California county governments over four election cycles, we find compelling evidence of traffic enforcement policy manipulation by county sheriffs during election years. Specifically, a county's per capita traffic fines revenue is 30% lower in the election than in nonelection years. The magnitude of the political cycle intensifies when an incumbent sheriff runs for reelection or an election is competitive. Our findings contribute to the political budget cycle theory and provide timely insights into the ongoing debate surrounding law enforcement reform and local governments' increasing reliance on fines and fees revenue.

In the United States, religious congregations, as an important subset of the nonprofit sector, attract the most civic participation. Unlike other tax-exempt organizations, churches do not file the annual tax informational Form 990 to the Internal Revenue Service, following the traditional notion of separation of church and state. Due to such an exemption, the church financial market exhibits a more severe information asymmetry problem than the corporate or nonprofit financial markets. The pecking order theory in corporate finance postulates that information asymmetry increases external financing costs, resulting in organizations demonstrating a pecking order of preference: internal funding first, then debt, and lastly, equity. This article presents the first known attempt in examining the pecking order theory in the context of church organizations, which is a large but opaque subset of nonprofit organizations. By examining the revenue and capital structures of over 30,000 United Methodist churches from 2005 to 2018, we find evidence that supports a pecking order in church mortgage loan borrowing. This study increases our understanding of church finance and congregational capital structure. It highlights the value of transparency in the church capital market and fills a significant gap in both the nonprofit finance research and the religious sector literature.

Gas taxes represent one of the most important revenue sources for state transportation funding. This study draws upon the theory of policy innovation and diffusion and examines the drivers of legislative decisions to directly increase state gas tax rates among 50 states from 2010 to 2018. Using a discrete event history analysis, this study finds that states raise gas tax rates in response to the growing funding needs of maintaining and improving the quality and performance of state highway infrastructure. Additionally, these findings suggest that state internal characteristics— poverty rate, personal income, rising gas prices, as well as the external influences of neighboring states affect the adoption of a gas tax rate hike.

In traffic enforcement, officers have a broad range of discretionary power. They decide whether to initiate a stop. They also decide whether to write a ticket or to give a warning. Various factors affect officers' discretion, such as a driver's race, gender, and neighborhood characteristics. This study examines the influence of budget cuts to the sheriff's department on a county's traffic fines revenue. This study applies a difference-in-difference approach to analyze traffic citations issued by two groups of traffic enforcement officers-California's county sheriff deputies and California Highway Patrol (CHP) officers. Results show that deputies raised more traffic fines after their department experienced budget cuts in the previous years. In contrast, the number of tickets issued by CHP officers who do not receive financial benefits from the county government is not affected by a county's fiscal condition changes. This study provides evidence that traffic enforcement is under financial influence.

Volatile revenues affect the quality and consistency of municipal service provision. This article investigates how cities use unreserved general fund balances to mitigate annual expenditure fluctuations when confronted with volatile revenues. Based on the analysis of a panel dataset of over two thousand American cities from 2003 to 2011, the fixed-effects regression results suggest that unreserved general fund balances reduce municipal expenditure fluctuations on a year-to-year basis. The expenditure-smoothing effects were more pronounced when municipal governments experienced large revenue changes. Results are robust when excluding large cities, using different cutting-points to define 'moderate' or 'large' revenue changes, and in recession and non-recession years. This article contributes to the local expenditure stabilization literature by recognizing the unreserved general fund balances' expenditure-smoothing effects during 'non-rainy days.' It adds empirical evidence to the organizational theory that financial slack works as a crucial buffer against external changes and provides managerial discretion to local administrators.

Government savings can be a conundrum that perplexes taxpayers. Excessive savings indicate that taxpayers either pay unnecessarily high taxes, or they do not receive adequate returns on services. Insufficient savings leave government officials little financial flexibility. The Great Recession and its aftermath have renewed interest in understanding government savings. This article uses dynamic panel modeling to analyze the determinants of municipal discretionary savings. Results show that risk factors are the primary drivers of municipal savings, and high-risk factors have greater impact on the amount of savings. This finding confirms organization theory's view of savings as a crucial buffer against risk.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that local governments may have a revenue motive for traffic fines, beyond public safety concerns, Using California's county-level data over a 12-year period, this article shows that counties increased per capita traffic fines by 40 to 42 cents immediately after a 10 percentage point tax revenue loss in the previous year; however, these counties did not reduce traffic fines if they experienced a tax revenue increase in the previous year This finding indicates that county governments probably view traffic fines as a revenue source to offset tax revenue loss, but not as a revenue stabilizer to manage revenue fluctuation. This article also finds that low-income and Hispanic-majority counties raised more traffic fines. Counties that generated more revenue from the hotel tax-a tax typically paid by travelers and visitors-raised more traffic fines, indicating a possible tax-exporting behavior by shifting the traffic fine burden to nonlocal drivers..

State legislatures and their member legislators serve as important overseers to state administrative departments, charged to function as principals relative to departmental agents. Yet, we know relatively little about how legislators assess the performance of those departments. This research is designed to improve that knowledge through an exploratory analysis of how and why legislators in one state assess the performance of a large state government department. Using data from a survey of Georgia state legislators, the article explores legislator evaluations of the state’s Department of Transportation (GDOT) and the factors that may underlie those evaluations. The findings suggest that legislators assess administrative performance on three principal dimensions: (a) administrative service to individual legislators, (b) assistance to the legislature as a whole, and (c) performance in meeting the state’s transportation needs. Those assessments appear to be shaped by legislator perceptions of (a) personal interactions with the department and (b) the quality of specific GDOT products and services. These and earlier findings suggest that the focus of public performance measurement systems might be broadened to include measures of personal treatment by administrative agencies in addition to traditional objective service outcome measures.

Many municipal governments face the challenge of temporary cash deficits due to the mismatched schedules of cash flow-ins and flow-outs. To smooth the temporary deficits, they can use either internal financial resources such as financial slack or external financial resources such as short-term borrowing. This paper applies the pecking order theory to examine municipal governments' financial preference when they experience cash flow problems. Results show that municipal governments prefer accumulated financial slack to short-term borrowing when both options are available. This finding demonstrates financial slack's role as a convenient cash management tool in municipal financial management. It also suggests the applicability of the pecking order theory in future public financial management research.