North Carolina's County and Municipal Fiscal Analysis Tool: Research Review

Have you ever used the County and Municipal Fiscal Analysis tool that is housed on Treasurer’s website?  It allows municipalities and counties in the state to see how they are doing with regard to financial condition and compare their performance to peers.  It has recently become the focus of new research coming from colleagues at the University of South Dakota and Indiana University.  Ed Gerrish and Luke Spreen presented their research on our benchmarking tool earlier this month at the Public Management Research Conference and it is forthcoming at the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory.  In this Research Review I am going to discuss their research and pull a few findings that are especially notable for those of you that work in budgeting and finance. Their paper “Does Benchmarking Encourage Improvement or Convergence? Evaluating North Carolina’s Fiscal Benchmarking Tool” evaluates whether the introduction of our benchmarking tool led to improvements in the performance of local governments or did it lead to some of the lower performing governments doing better and some of the high performing governments doing worse?  In that second option, the middle would stay in the middle, because that is fine, but the top may actually