Akheil Singla

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at Arizona State University

This study investigates how information about municipal credit ratings influences voters' evaluations of incumbent mayors. Through an original survey experiment, we assess the impact of credit rating downgrades and crime rate increases on citizens' perceptions of mayoral performance. Our findings reveal that information on both issues significantly...

This article combines unconditional quantile regressions with difference-in-differences to study the distributive effects of a foreign buyer tax (FBT) on home prices in New South Wales (NSW). The main results reveal that the FBT reduces house prices in NSW but only among the more expensive houses located in desirable neighborhoods of Sydney and wit...

Municipal bankruptcy has historically been an extremely rare event. However, with the onset of the global financial crisis in 2007, many cities in the United States were under fiscal stress, coinciding with an uptick in the number of bankruptcies. This study leverages the proximity and similarity of three Chapter 9 filings in the State of Californi...

Many states possess the authority to intervene in local fiscal emergencies, in some cases curtailing decision‐making powers of local officials through the appointment of an emergency financial manager. Previous research recognizes that these managers can push through unpopular reforms that may improve financial health but come at the expense of loc...

Revenue‐motivated policing is a common explanation for law enforcement behavior. This means in times of fiscal stress police alter their behavior to increase the financial returns to their actions. But does variation in the institutional features of local governments lead to variation in law enforcement behavior? Using a plausibly exogenous measure...

State‐imposed limitations on local government taxation and expenditures (TELs) are a common part of American federalism. But the consequences of TELs are the subject of debate. Are TELs institutional constraints that harm local governments? Or are TELs institutionally irrelevant veils easily pierced by political actors? This research uses the remov...

Local governments facing extreme fiscal stress have few options. One that has historically been rare is filing for Chapter 9 bankruptcy. The limited number of cases has prevented systematic study of municipal bankruptcy. But given the results of bankruptcy for individuals, there are reasons to believe that bankruptcy can provide a financial fresh s...

While municipalities in the United States face many challenges, one of the most critical is an aging stock of infrastructure. Concurrent with this issue is a new fiscal reality where local governments face unfunded pension liabilities, difficulties in raising revenues, and potentially declining state and federal support. As a result, meeting infras...

Historically, revenue associated with things like traffic citations—termed fines and forfeitures—has made up an insignificant portion of city revenue. In recent years, however, cities are increasingly reliant on these revenues. This changed without fanfare, meaning there is little understanding of how or why it occurred. One potential explanation i...

Despite significant coverage in the financial press in recent years, financial engineering by city governments via the use of financial derivatives such as interest rate swaps remain an understudied area of urban financial policy. Indeed, press accounts and other case or conceptual urban studies research emphasizing the downside of these transactio...

Public managers and organizations are often encouraged to take a proactive role in finding solutions to the challenges that face their communities. These challenges require meeting increasingly high expectations for public service provision with ever reducing resources. This research investigates the relationship between change in resource constrai...

Although there are strong theoretical arguments about both the benefits and costs of decentralization in the federalism literature, there is little on how second-order fiscal decentralization effects the financial health of state governments. This study examines this question and adds to the understanding of state-and-local fiscal relations. Using...

This article examines union business leave (UBL) or official time practices among the 77 largest municipalities in the United States. Specifically, it evaluates UBL practices as articulated in 231 collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) of police, firefighter, and nonsafety public employee unions. Results indicate that UBL is prevalent as 72% of un...

Financial condition analysis is a critical task for public managers, but it is still unclear which indicators are the most salient measures of financial well-being. The financial health of Detroit, Michigan is unequivocally poor, providing an interesting case to evaluate the financial condition indicators that currently exist. We calculate the key...

The increasing use of debt-related derivatives over the last 10 years, combined with the recent global financial crisis' impact on these instruments, greatly affected the finances of many state and local governments in the United States. Some observers believe the negative effects could have been minimized had governments established prudent financ...