Research

New York's huge budget deficit—$15.4 billion in the next 15 months—will force difficult choices in terms of government services and tax policies for years to come. To engage intelligently in that debate, New Yorkers need far more information than we now receive from Albany. Read More

Australia's Macquarie, along with Spain's Cintra, was the global pioneer of large-scale private-public partnerships (PPPs) in transportation infrastructure. American states and Read More

In his first annual address to legislators last week, Gov. David A. Paterson said, "The state of our state is perilous." Yet his energy platform promises to visit more peril upon the Empire State. Read More

Data point #1. Metropolitan Transportation Authority executive director Elliot Sander and the authority's board members attracted more than 600 people to their marathon six-and-a-half-hour fare-hike and service-cut hearing in Manh Read More

In a  interview in yesterday's Journal, David Swensen, the longtime chief investment officer for Yale's endowment, had an implicit warning for public pension funds and other supposedly "sophisticated" investors (ha ha) whose overseers thi Read More

Congressman Anthony Weiner, a probable mayoral candidate, showed yesterday that if he does run, he's going to campaign against Mayor Bloomberg's fiscal record over the past eight years -- and boy, does Weiner have a lot of material. Most startlin Read More

In recent months, states and cities have lobbied for their piece of the bailout pie. Among other requests, they've asked the federal government to support municipal bond markets by directly buying municipal bonds through the new programs that the Tr Read More

If the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is right, Governor David Paterson's economic and fiscal projections for New York State are not gloomy enough.  The CBO expects higher unemployment and a somewhat slower recovery than Paterson's budget has pro Read More

An in today's New York Daily News shows that what used to be considered a morally heartless and politically unworkable idea -- cutting public-sector salaries and benefits to a manageable level -- is now becoming mainstream thinking. Read More

The media treated it as good news when the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union said last week that they'd settle their next contract through binding arbitration. Read More

New York City's average compensation cost per municipal employee is $106,743, and has grown 63 percent since fiscal year 2000, according to a Citizens Budget Commission (CBC) released yesterday.    While base pay has grown faster than inflation d Read More

The chairman of India-based outsourcing giant Satyam, which has done work for a third of Fortune 500 companies, has confessed to a massive accounting fraud. He wrote that he had overreported profits and underreported liabilities until the fraud Read More