ANGELA K. GORE, George Washington University
Email: agore@gwu.edu

This study examines the determinants of municipal cash holdings and the implications of holding high levels of cash. The first part of the analysis investigates municipal manager incentives to accumulate cash as part of normal operations. Results indicate that municipalities with a higher variation in revenues, fewer sources of revenues, and higher growth accumulate more cash. Larger governments and those receiving relatively more state revenue accumulate less cash.

Further analysis considers whether high levels of cash indicate agency problems, and finds municipalities with high cash holdings spend more on administrative expenses, city manager salaries, and bonuses. I find no evidence that municipalities with excess cash reduce taxes. The presence of staggered councils and councils that are not independent tend to exacerbate excessive cash holdings. These results are consistent with the proposition that municipalities with high cash levels have agency problems relative to those with lower cash holdings.

AKIO MATSUMOTO, affiliation not provided to SSRN

Since a finite time delay in government purchases of goods and service cannot be ignored, this paper studies how such a time lag in a fiscal policy affects the stability of the income adjustment process. Formulating the income adjustment process with time delay, it adopts two different approaches: one is a fixed time lag and the other is a continuously distributed lag. It is demonstrated that the continuously distributed time lag has the stronger destabilizing effect if the adjustment of the government expenditure is slow while the fixed lag has the stronger destabilizing effect if this adjustment is rapid.

MARTIN LARCH, European Union - Directorate General for Economic and Financial Affairs (DG ECFIN)
Email: martin.larch@ec.europa.eu
SVEN LANGEDIJK, affiliation not provided to SSRN
Email: sven.langedijk@ec.europa.eu

Real-time estimates of potential output are used for the calculation of the cyclically-adjusted budget balance, one of the main indicators in the assessment of the fiscal performance of EU Member States. The estimation of potential output involves a decomposition of actual output into a cyclical and a structural component based on arbitrary assumptions about the statistical properties of the two unobserved components. With a very high degree of smoothing, variations in GDP are mostly taken to be temporary as are the ensuing changes in the headline deficit. Conversely, with a low degree of smoothing, variations in GDP are mostly taken to be permanent, leading to different policy conclusions. Our paper examines whether and how different degrees of smoothness of potential output would have supported different decisions in the EU budgetary surveillance in terms of both timing and substance. The results show that only a very high degree of smoothing of potential output would significantly reduce the reliability of the surveillance indicators. We conclude that a higher degree of smoothing compared with current practice would not be harmful for EU fiscal surveillance, while it could contribute to more cautious policies by signaling larger and longer periods of economic 'good times'.