State and Local Government Financial Fundamentals

Abstract

The Stanford Municipal Finance Dashboard, available at https://municipalfinance.stanford.edu, is an original resource to provide financial fundamentals for all state governments and the 500 largest local governments in the United States. We summarize the financial position of public entities by several important financial metrics similar to the practice in the corporate finance context. These metrics have been largely missing for public entities. We close this gap by publishing these indicators and provide an aggregate financial strength score for all state governments and the largest local governments in the United States. This document describes the methodology that we use.

Keywords: Public debt, state and local governments, fiscal fundamentals, liquidity, reserves, maturity structure, financial fragility, interest rates

JEL Classification: E43, E44, H63, H74