Service Delivery by State and Local Governments

State and local governments account for roughly one eighth of US employment and an even larger share of GDP. They play a key role in delivering many critical services such as education, transportation, public safety, and health care as well as key components of the social safety net.  They also face a number of long-term challenges in delivering these services. These include rising costs associated with labor-intensive services such as education, funding difficulties that arise from tax competition in the presence of mobile tax bases, and localized population declines, which reduce scale economies and introduce the challenges of retrenchment. 

To promote research on service delivery by state and local governments, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), with the generous support of the Smith Richardson Foundation, will convene a research conference in Cambridge, MA, on January 28–29, 2027. NBER researchers Jeffrey Clemens (University of California, San Diego) and James Poterba (MIT) will co-organize the meeting. 

The conference will showcase research on the services delivered by state and local governments, with an emphasis on the production process within the government sector, the potential role of private organizations, both firms and non-profit organizations, in complementing the government’s role, and the valuation of publicly-provided services. Examples of research topics that are within scope include, but are not limited to:

• The effect of fluctuating revenue streams from tax revenues or intergovernmental grants on the level of service delivery by states and localities.
• The labor market for public sector workers, including both the level and form of compensation relative to the private sector and the role of financing strategies for retiree health and pension benefits.
• The impact of different procurement rules for capital goods that are used in service delivery, such as transportation infrastructure, prisons, and public-school buildings.
• The incentives that safety net programs provided by state and local governments create for both household and firm behavior, including programs such as unemployment insurance and Medicaid.
• How service delivery and cost depend on a jurisdiction’s population, and the extent to which there are economies of scale.
• How fiscal rules and other institutions mediate the policy response of state and local governments to contracting populations.
• How K-12 school districts have confronted the challenge of enrollment loss and how demographic trends will impact public universities going forward.
• The impact of state responses to changes in the federal cost share of Medicaid expenditures, such as those enacted in the Affordable Care Act.
• The evolving role of public transit systems in an environment with rising rates of work-from-home and a dynamic private market for transportation services.
• Whether and in what ways artificial intelligence can be harnessed to improve the efficiency of state and local government agencies.  

The organizers welcome finished papers as well as early-stage papers that will be completed by January 2027. Submissions should be uploaded by 11:59pm ET on July 15, 2026. 

Submissions are encouraged from researchers with and without NBER affiliations, from academia, government, or the private sector, and from early career scholars. Please do not submit papers that have been accepted for publication and will be published by the time of the conference. 

Authors of papers selected for the program will be notified in August 2026. The NBER will provide a modest honorarium to the authors of papers that are selected for presentation and will cover hotel and economy-class conference travel for up to two authors per paper. Please direct questions about this project to confer@nber.org.