The Fiscal Resilience of American Cities

Abstract

This paper brings together the concepts of fiscal health and resilience as they are understood in a contemporary context while seeking to establish whether a quantitative model of analysis can be meaningfully derived and applied to major American cities. Using major recessions from 1977 to 2015 as an exogenous shock, the values for fiscal health are assessed temporally to arrive at an assessment for whether a certain group of cities is inherently more resilient than others. Given subjective nature of the concepts used, this paper also grapples with the fact that any results must be analyzed within a local context. The end result is aimed to produce a tool for cities to compare how they performed in the wake of a recession and eventually work towards an understanding of what policy actions can be done to make a city more resilient.