Handbook of local government fiscal health / Edited by Helisse Levine, Jonathan B. Justice, and Eric A. Scorsone.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Foreword -- Introduction -- Fiscal health and sustainability concepts and measures -- Assessing the financial condition of local governments : what is financial condition and how is it measured? -- Local government fiscal stress and its measurement in theory and practice -- Financial reporting and modeling -- The development of external financial reporting and its relationship to the assessment of fiscal health and stress -- Long-term financial forecasting and modeling for local governments -- Pensions/opeb issues -- Postemployment benefits and fiscal analysis -- Sustainable approaches to retiree benefits : options and implementation for program design and financing -- Revenue elasticity and adequacy -- Public-finance and fiscal-federalism perspectives on local government revenue bases and fiscal sustainability -- Understanding and measuring revenue elasticity, volatility, and implications for local government fiscal health -- Business cycle, bubbles, and reserve funds : cutback management for the 21st century -- Fiscal stress and cutback management amongst state and local governments : what have we learned and what remains to be learned? -- A framework for deciphering and managing the fiscal environment -- Fiscal slack, reserves, and rainy-day funds -- Managing investments and investment risks -- State oversight practices, including detailed case studies of exemplars -- An intergovernmental perspective on local government fiscal health -- Monitoring the fiscal health of America's cities -- Measuring the impacts of TELs on municipal financial conditions -- The defragmentation of authority : a consolidation approach to public service delivery -- Debt capacity, management and policy -- Measuring and monitoring debt capacity and affordability : market- and nonmarket-based models -- State fiscal constraints on local government borrowing : effects on scale and cost -- Good debt, gone bad : the 2008-09 crisis in municipal debt markets -- Appendices -- Glossary -- Index.