State Fiscal Reserves and the Great Recession

Abstract

Governments around the world accumulate fiscal reserves to prepare for exogenous shocks such as recessions. Using data from 2004 to 2016 for state governments in the United States, we estimate empirical models controlling for time-variant and -invariant state characteristics. Our results show that savings increase at the expense of spending in specific categories and that fiscal reserves also support only certain expenditure functions. Further, we find that the relationship between savings and spending differs over the business cycle as fiscal reserves increase during times of economic prosperity and decrease during economic declines.