IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/1014.html

Federal, State, and Local Governments: Evaluating their Separate Roles in US Growth

Author

Listed:
  • Higgins, Matthew
  • Young, Andrew
  • Levy, Daniel

Abstract

We use new US county level data (3,058 observations) from 1970 to 1998 to explore the relationship between economic growth and the size of government at three levels: federal, state and local. Using 3SLS-IV estimation we find that the size of federal, state and local government all either negatively correlate with or are uncorrelated with economic growth. We find no evidence that government is more efficient at more or less decentralized levels. Furthermore, while we cannot separate out the productive and redistributive services of government, we document that the county-level income distribution became slightly wider from 1970 to 1998. Our findings suggest that a release of government-employed labor inputs to the private sector would be growth-enhancing.

Suggested Citation

  • Higgins, Matthew & Young, Andrew & Levy, Daniel, 2006. "Federal, State, and Local Governments: Evaluating their Separate Roles in US Growth," MPRA Paper 1014, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:1014
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/1014/1/MPRA_paper_1014.pdf
    File Function: original version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Herath, Shanaka, 2009. "The Size of the Government and Economic Growth. An Empirical Study of Sri Lanka," SRE-Discussion Papers 2009/08, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business.
    2. Bologna, Jamie & Young, Andrew T. & Lacombe, Donald J., 2016. "A spatial analysis of incomes and institutional quality: evidence from US metropolitan areas," Journal of Institutional Economics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 12(1), pages 191-216, March.
    3. Snir, Avichai & Levy, Daniel, 2010. "Economic Growth in the Potterian Economy," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, pages 211-236.
    4. Young, Andrew T. & Higgins, Matthew J. & Levy, Daniel, 2013. "Heterogeneous Convergence," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 120(2), pages 238-241.
    5. Timothy Komarek & Scott Loveridge, 2015. "Firm Sizes And Economic Development: Estimating Long-Term Effects On U.S. County Growth, 1990–2000," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 55(2), pages 262-279, March.
    6. Ma, Xufei & Ding, Zhujun & Yuan, Lin, 2016. "Subnational institutions, political capital, and the internationalization of entrepreneurial firms in emerging economies," Journal of World Business, Elsevier, vol. 51(5), pages 843-854.
    7. Dodge Cahan & Niklas Potrafke, 2021. "The Democrat-Republican presidential growth gap and the partisan balance of the state governments," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 189(3), pages 577-601, December.
    8. Shanaka Herath, 2012. "Size Of Government And Economic Growth: A Nonlinear Analysis," Economic Annals, Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Belgrade, vol. 57(194), pages 7-30, July - Se.
    9. repec:wvu:wpaper:11-03 is not listed on IDEAS

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • H50 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - General
    • O47 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity - - - Empirical Studies of Economic Growth; Aggregate Productivity; Cross-Country Output Convergence
    • H70 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - General
    • R11 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Regional Economic Activity: Growth, Development, Environmental Issues, and Changes

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:1014. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Joachim Winter (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.