McGuire Applies Tax Research to Cities and States

Fall 2002, Volume 24, Number 1

Therese McGuire

Public finance expert Therese McGuire spent much of the fall editing a forum on public economics and health policy for the December issue of the National Tax Journal, for which she serves as co-editor. Among the issues raised in the forum is how health insurance is currently provided in the United States, the problems it faces, and the policy options for changing it.

McGuire is now editing a forum on research advances in education financing for the June ’03 issue of the NTJ. She also is organizing a series of policy conferences ” with William Gale at Brookings on “State Fiscal Crises: Causes, Consequences, Solutions that will be co-sponsored by The Urban Institute.

“We need a better understanding of how state spending and revenues react to changes in the business cycle, she said.

McGuire,who joined IPR as a faculty fellow this fall, is a professor of management and strategy at the Kellogg School of Management, and co-chair of IPR’s Urban Policy Working Group. She specializes in state and local public finance, fiscal decentralization, property tax limitations, education finance, and regional economic development.

Much of her work has focused on tax policy, particularly as it affects regional economic development. Some of her earliest publications dealt with the effect of tax regimes in the local decisions of firms, and the effects of firm locations on local taxes. More recently, she has been concerned with the effects of tax incentives for attracting business firms.

“A hallmark of my career has been the symbiotic relationship between my research and my forays into public service and outreach,” McGuire said. A former senior economist for the Minnesota Tax Study Commission, McGuire worked with a similar commission for the state of Arizona where she directed a study of the state’s revenues and expenditures.

McGuire is co-authoring a paper that revisits her earlier research on the long-run impact of the Illinois tax caps on local government property taxes and school district funding.

She also is participating in a large comparative study of how a country’s institutional setup affects spending at the state and local level. McGuire‘s focus is Spain, where she is examining the demand for public goods in a country where fiscal responsibility has devolved from a centralized system to autonomous communities who have spending authority but receive nearly all of their funding from grants.

Previously, McGuire was a professor of urban planning and public affairs and associate director of the Institute of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois at Chicago.