The Center for State and Local Finance
Next Generation Public Finance
August 7, 2013
Executive Summary: The Center for State and Local Finance (CSLF) will build on the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies reputation as 4th in the nation in scholarship and education in public finance. The Center will focus on bringing together the academic community with the community of practice to develop “next generation” research and training in public finance. Key initiatives will include:
1) Developing training and executive education in intermediate and advanced public finance to provide professional development for the next generation of practitioners in state and local finance.
2) Building a technical assistance capacity in next generation technologies for the public sector that include use of “big data” and improved data analytics to better inform policy-makers (evidence-based policy-making) and to better target solutions to public sector problems.
3) Supporting scholarship on key topics in state and local tax policy and public finance and build a strong capacity to translate and communicate academic research for the practitioner audience through social media, infographics, and other forms of web-based data interfaces.
4) Developing a network of scholars in state and local finance, both through training graduate students, developing the capacity of in-house staff and affiliated faculty, and through building strong connections with existing national and international public finance scholars.
Funding: The Center will initially be funded by existing University support to the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies. This funding for the new Center currently supports part of the FRC’s non-tax related research and academic mission and will continue to provide this support as well as provide seed money for building a web and social media presence in fiscal policy, and developing training, technical assistance, and new longer term research initiatives.
The FRC will continue in its current role of providing tax research support as well as tax advisement to state policy-makers, support for the State Economist, work on fiscal notes, the tax expenditure budget, and the tax handbook.