Bill Simonsen

Reasonableness, Satisfaction, and Willingness to Pay Property Taxes

The authors explore whether citizen preferences for taxes are influenced by perceptions of the quality of government and government services. Waterford, Connecticut, was faced with a revenue crisis when the property taxes paid by a nuclear power facility in the town were significantly reduced after deregulation. On the basis of a survey of town residents, the authors find that citizens in Waterford were willing to act reasonably in response to fiscal problems. Furthermore, attitudes toward government and its services are important determinants of support for taxes.

Competition and Selection in Municipal Bond Sales: Evidence from Missouri

This article describes the results of an interest cost analysis of local government debt issuance in the State of Missouri. In Missouri the vast majority of municipal bonds are sold on a no bid basis. We discuss the theoretical arguments for and against competition and selection. Then we determine the degree to which cost differences exist while correcting for any potential selection bias. We use data on local government general obligation bonds sold from May 2004 to May 2005 provided by the Missouri State Auditors office. We find that this substantial lack of competition imposes significant costs on Missouri governments.

A dynamic method of citizen preference revelation

In this article we explore two citizen-based approaches to solving the problem of selecting a desirable level of public goods for a jurisdiction. The first approach seeks to inform decision-makers about citizens’ preferences by observing the choices of citizens faced with the actual budget constraint facing the government and asking them to choose service levels within that constraint. The second approach gauges citizens’ willingness-to-pay for their share of the cost of a desired level of public expenditure. In an effort to foster discussion and research into new modes of citizen participation in resource allocation we pose a model that combines both the constraints of the jurisdiction with the tax share of the respondent into a survey methodology that will reveal the underlying demand for government services in ways that are useful for public managers.

Municipal Bond New Issue Transaction Costs

As with any market, there are transaction costs associated with the sale of municipal bonds. Only a small number of studies have examined this topic, and therefore we have only a limited understanding of the magnitude and determinants of new issue municipal bond transaction costs. We use data on California municipal bond transaction costs from 2007 to 2009 to test whether scale economies exist. We find that there are considerable transaction cost scale economies for California municipal bonds and that pooling bond sales would likely save substantial amounts of money.

Citizens, budgets and performance measures: a case study of west hartford, connecticut

This article reports on a design for citizen identified performance measures for budgeting that seeks to overcome problems of validity and representativeness that typically exist in citizen involvement processes. This design selected participants using random sampling so that each resident had the same chance of being invited to be in one of the focus groups that worked to develop outcome measures for a set of town services. In order to assure that the resulting measures were helpful to residents at large, an additional phase of the process involved a large sample survey of town residents to validate the results. The results were a set of performance measures that were developed by a small group of citizens that the population at large found useful to them when thinking about local services.

Taxes, Time, and Support for Security

New technologies have been developed in response to terrorism. These present problems for local officials: implementing technologies will be expensive, and no technologies exist that can be used to gauge demand. We apply contingent valuation methodologies to determine support for additional taxes to pay for new terrorism-related technologies and services. We present findings from a national survey about peoples attitudes toward terrorism prevention and response. We find that respondents generally support new services and technologies and local tax increases to pay for them. We also find that respondents are willing to pay more if programs have everyday uses that would enhance public safety, but are less supportive as inconveniences increase.

Debt Issued Through Others: Conduits, Joint Powers Authorities, and Borrowing Costs in California Local Governments

The issuance of debt is a complicated and time-consuming task requiring governments to pay substantial fixed transaction costs. Conduit financings, where one entity issues debt on behalf of a government, including bond pools, where multiple governments issue debt together, are methods that offer the potential to reduce the burdens of participating governments, ideally lowering their costs. But conduit hosts have costs of their own to cover and may not be able to offer a cost advantage to their participants. In this paper we examine debt issued under the Marks Roos Act of 1985, a law created to facilitate pooling but actually used for conduit financing. We seek to determine how issuers fare using this mechanism rather than issuing by themselves. We examine issuance costs and borrowing costs (true interest cost) and find both to be significantly lower for those governments that issued by themselves.

Implementing Homeland Security Technologies: Differences in Willingness to Pay

Since 9/11, advanced homeland security-related technologies and specialized services have been implemented—and more are under consideration—to prevent and detect security threats, and to respond to and recover from any incidents that occur. These technologies and services are expensive, and citizens differ in their support and willingness to pay for them. Support may be dependent on where one lives. If this is so, then it would be appropriate for public decision-makers in certain localities to expend more effort and scarce resources to pursue homeland security grants, participate in homeland security programs, and invest in homeland security technologies. The paper explores this notion by examining whether people who live in New York City are more likely to support, and more willing to pay for, terrorism prevention and detection technologies and services. The authors use data from surveys administered to citizens nationally and in New York City in 2006 and regression analysis to explore two causal models. The authors find that New Yorkers are more willing to pay for these services and technologies.

Information, Tax Salience, and Support for School Bond Referenda: Information, Tax Salience, and Support for School Bond Referenda

We examine whether the salience of the property tax liability implications of voting yes on a school bond referendum affects bond approval rates. We exploit the fact that school districts in Minnesota are required to explicitly note the property tax implications of voting yes on bond referenda in bold capital letters on a ballot while districts in the neighboring state of Wisconsin are only required to inform voters of the amount of bonds to be issued. Using data on local school bond passage rates from Minnesota and Wisconsin over the period 2008–2017, we find that when the property tax implications of voting yes are more salient, the fraction of voters favoring bond passage declines by approximately four to seven percentage points and the probability of bond passage falls by approximately ten percentage points. These results are robust to numerous specification checks including propensity score weighting methods and leveraging the geographic distance between school districts in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Gender-Based Violence Prevention Workshops: An Experimental Evaluation of Efficacy

ABSTRACT Gender-based violence has become an increasingly visible and salient public problem. In the Fall of 2015, the University of Connecticut’s Violence Against Women Prevention Program (VAWPP) implemented interactive workshops in first-year experience (FYE) classes to reduce rape myth acceptance, improve knowledge and understanding of the University’s affirmative consent policy, and increase confidence in interpreting cues related to sexual consent. This randomized experimental design tested whether these outcomes were realized as a result of the workshops. In almost all instances, the workshops substantially and statistically significantly decreased students’ rape myth acceptance, increased their knowledge and understanding of consent, and improved their confidence in cue interpretation.