The Impact of State Fiscal Policy on States’ Resilience Exiting the Great Recession

Abstract

This study employs a state-level model of recovery and a comprehensive set of tax- and expenditure-related variables to explore the effect that the states’ fiscal policy decisions had on their recoveries after the Great Recession in the United States. In addition, we combine those findings with our resistance results from two earlier studies to identify the structural and fiscal-policy factors that consistently strengthened or weakened the states’ economic resilience entering, during, and exiting that recession. Although our analysis indicates that resistance and recovery are distinctly different economic resilience phenomena, states that avoided sales and corporate income taxes, and that committed a greater share of their resources to public welfare expenditures, fared better than others throughout. This knowledge may aid state governments’ fiscal policy decision making as they prepare for future recessionary shocks.