The Government Finance Database, United States, 1967-2015

Quantitative public financial management research is limited by the lack of a common database for empirical analysis. The U.S. Census Bureau distributes government finance data that some scholars have utilized, but the difficult process of collecting, interpreting, and organizing the data has led its adoption to be prohibitive and inconsistent. This study offers a single, coherent resource that contains all of the census data from 1967 through the most recent update, uses easy to understand natural-language variable names, and it will be extended when new data is available. Identical data is posted at: http://willamette.edu/mba/research-impact/public-datasets/index.html. The six data sets are as follows: DS #1: County Data DS #2: Municipal Data DS #3: School District Data DS #4: Special District Data DS #5: State Data DS #6: Township Data