January 14, 2026
Reorganizing My Teaching Files
While there are some resources on how to organize empirical research files, there is almost nothing for teaching. This is my attempt to solve that.
January 1, 2026
Inspired by Uses This And App Defaults, this post includes a relatively up-to-date description of the stuff I use to do things.
December 12, 2025
Sorting out conference notes with Obsidian
Using Obsidian's new Apple Shortcuts support to streamline conference note-taking.
December 8, 2025
From "Municipal amalgamations and scale economies: Evidence from South Africa’s structural reforms" in Urban Studies.
December 5, 2025
Quoting Haixin-Tsik, Miyazaki, and Drew
From "The Financial Sustainability of Local Governments With Declining Populations" in State & Local Government Review.
December 3, 2025
Automating Quarto blog post generation with Raycast
Creating new blog posts in Quarto can be a bit of a pain because of a lack of a templating system. This is a functionality I came to rely on when this blog was built with Hugo. So, with some help from Andrew Heiss, I built a templating system using Raycast.
November 12, 2025
Quoting Manduca, Highsmith, and Waggoner
Robert Manduca, Brian Highsmith, Jacob Waggoner, Tax base fragmentation as a dimension of metropolitan inequality, _Socio-Economic Review_, 2025
May 5, 2025
I use Obsidian as my main notetaking app (among many other things it does for me). I try to implement Andy Matuschak's 'Evergreen Notes' method when working through a particular concept in the literature. Often, this means linking notes together that haven't been created yet. This post outlines a method of finding such orphaned links, so I can fill them in.
April 14, 2025
What do universities actually do?
With universities all over the United States under fire from the Trump administration, there appears to be mass confusion by non-academics about what universities do. This post is meant as a plain language explainer of the kinds of things that research-intensive universities do.
April 1, 2025
For many academics, 40%+ of their time is spent on activities that can fall into the category of 'creating'. With this in mind, what do academics need to be successful creators? How can departments better support them in this role?
November 8, 2024
I have a niche problem. I have a key light in my office that I want to control via a macOS shortcut rather than the light's app. It turns out that's easy but also not easy.
March 7, 2024
Where are all of our students?
No, you're not crazy for asking where all the students have gone.
January 9, 2024
My Necessarily Flawed List of Best or Most Interesting Articles of 2023
My list of the best or most interesting articles appearing in issues dated 2023. They are mostly local government, but some others sneak in that are important to my work in some way.
September 13, 2023
My coauthor, Deborah Carroll, and I recently had the pleasure of writing a blog post for the London School of Economic’s US Centre Blog. It covers a our recent publication in *Public Administration Review* on whether special districts are complements or substitutes for spcial districts. See below for the full text of the post as well as a link to the original.
June 28, 2023
My coauthor, Megan Hatch, and I recently had the pleasure of writing a blog post for the London School of Economic’s US Centre Blog. It covers a our recent publication in *Urban Studies* on the factors associated with the preemption of local affordable housing laws. See below for the full text of the post as well as a link to the original.
May 26, 2023
Overlapping local governments in DuPage County, IL
Local governments in United States generally overlap other local governments. It is so common that many people do not give it a second thought; however, such a situation presents an interesting data visualization problem. How do you demonstrate the complexity of local government borders--both horizontally (where do neighboring cities intersect?) and vertically (which governments overlap a particular city or parcel)? I demonstrate one method using DuPage County, IL as an example.
April 28, 2022
I recently had the pleasure of writing a blog post for the London School of Economic’s US Centre Blog. It covers a recent controversy about the Reedy Creek Improvement District -- something I have a somewhat unique perspective on as a scholar of local governments and, in particular, special districts. See below for the full text of the post as well as a link to the original.
December 7, 2021
Municipal Incorporation in the US, 1789 - 2020
I've been collecting data on the earliest date of municipal incorporation for every active municipality in the US. This project is beginning to bear fruit.
November 17, 2021
The structure of US local governments is often a poor predictor of local economic growth
I recently had the pleasure of writing a blog post for the London School of Economic’s US Centre Blog. It covers a recent publication in the *Journal of Urban Affairs* on the implications of local government structure on long-run economic growth in the US metropolitan areas. See below for the full text of the post as well as a link to the original.
July 14, 2021
Academic Project Management Notion (Update)
About a year ago, I wrote a small post about how I use Notion as a project management tool. I didn't really expect it to be as popular as it is, but I also didn't expect myself to change too much about the process either. It was working. Fast forward one, sort of over, but not really pandemic later. Things have certainly changed, sort of. This post is meant to explain some of those changes and to provide a template for anyone who wants to give this a spin.
April 22, 2021
Special Districts: America’s Shadow Governments
I recently had the pleasure of writing a short blog post for the UIC Government Finance Research Center's blog. The piece is a bit of a short explainer on special districts in the United States and a few fiscal issues that arise. It's by no means comprehensive but part of a broader focus I have on writing more popular or policy focused work on these relatively hidden local governments. Below is the intro (I don't have full re-print rights) and a link to the original.
April 16, 2021
Municipal Fragmentation in U.S. Metro Areas in 3 Maps
Over on Twitter, Dan Immergluck (GSU) asked about what municipal fragmentation in the U.S. at the metropolitan level looked like. I, an expert on local government…
September 15, 2020
The Price of Residential Street Parking
Cities, broadly, manage a number of public assets with which they provide public services. Some of those services are somewhat passive in the sense that no active labor…
June 11, 2020
Academic Project Management using Notion
I'm horribly bad at project management. It's not usually something that is specifically taught in graduate school even though it's incredibly important to an academic's professional life. There are many ways to go about this (low tech to super high tech), but the purpose of this post is to explain one tool that I have found incredibly useful and flexible. That tool is Notion (notion.so). Notion can do way more than I am going to explain (see Using Notion as Your Second Brain), but this is how I use it to keep track of writing projects throughout the process of development to publication.
April 17, 2020
Speculating on the Impact of COVID-19 on Chicagoland Property Taxes
Over on Twitter, I worked through a how the current COVID-19 pandemic might influence property taxes in the Chicagoland region (see below for a link to that thread if you…
February 25, 2020
How to Desaturate Figures for Publication using R
Many academic journals require figures in greyscale. This can be done relatively simply by printing to PDF as greyscale; however, this doesn't give you a) a way to preview what the resulting figure will look like and b) much control over the process of desaturation. If you're making figures in {R}, this process is almost as easy as the more simplistic print to PDF method.
January 19, 2020
I am teaching online again and that means recording audio lectures. A lot has changed (or I perceive it to have changed) since the last time I did this so I endeavored to find a way to record/edit all my lectures on an iPad Pro. To be clear, I made this harder on myself by restricting everything to be done on an iPad. But I want something reasonably portable in case I need to record on the go.
December 3, 2019
Recently, I was asked by a reviewer to include a large number of regression results in a manuscript I am revising. In my experience, attempting to display more than a few…
October 21, 2019
Why your sprawling, low-density suburb may be costing your local government money
I recently had the pleasure of writing a blog post for the London School of Economic’s US Centre Blog. It covers a recent publication in Public Budgeting and Finance on the…
October 15, 2019
Created in R with ggplot2. Full code and data can be found here. Data from the IPEDS Data Center for CIP 44.04 (MPA) and CIP 44.05 (MPP).
September 23, 2019
Local government overlap is calculated similar to Berry (2008) by taking the ratio of all special districts, school districts, and overlapping townships to municipalities…
September 11, 2019
Students Writing Their Own Exam Questions
Writing good exam questions is hard. If done correctly, the student should have no idea the lengths you went through to write a good set of questions. But maybe they should…
March 20, 2019
How a type of local government you may have never heard of may be costing you a bit more
I recently had the pleasure of writing a blog post for the London School of Economic’s US Centre Blog. It covers a recent publication in State and Local Government Review on…
December 12, 2018
Zipf’s law is a constant curiosity for urban observers. According to the law, the size of a city (i.e. population) is inversely related to the city’s population rank. This…
November 30, 2018
County Supervisors per 100,000 Residents
Created in with ggplot2. The relevant code is below.
July 31, 2018
Long-Run Metropolitan Economic Growth in the U.S.
Full color, stylized maps created for my working paper on local political fragmentation and economic growth. These three maps examine long-run (1960-2000) growth in…
July 28, 2018
Canadian City Councilors per 100,000 Residents
Created in with ggplot2. Full code and data can be found here.
July 28, 2018
City Councilors per 100,000 Residents
Created in with ggplot2. The relevant code is below.
June 30, 2018
Special District Creation and Dissolution
June 16, 2018
The Urban Institute has released a new package for mapping state and county data in R, urbnmapr. Their posts can be found here and here. Since I occasionally write about how…
April 18, 2018
Teaching Public Finance with John Oliver
Ever so often, I teach public finance to graduate students. I have found for many topics it helps to motivate them by providing some “real world” examples (sidenote: I hate…
March 31, 2017
State Collection of Local Government Public Finance Data
In a conversation with a few colleagues, the question came up of which states collect public finance data on their respective local governments. Over the years, I have been…
February 14, 2017
Maps in R using library(maps), Update!
I’ve previously written about how to make simple, print ready maps in R using library(maps). Unfortunately, the more recent versions the county database has some issues with…
January 13, 2015
Property Tax Reliance in U.S. County Areas
The property tax has a number of desirable properties. State and local governments have been using it in the U.S. forever, and it’s incredibly stable (up to a point, see…
July 11, 2013
My last few posts have included a large number of maps to visualize the Census of Governments’ organizations data. Rather than using a full fledged GIS program like ArcGIS…
May 23, 2013
Bill Fischel on School Districts
Bill Fischel talking about his not so new book Making the Grade: The Economic Evolution of American School Districts. Of most interest, to me at least, is the process by…
June 27, 2012
Thoughts on the Atlanta Transportation Sales Tax
On July 31, voters in Georgia will go to the polls to, among other things, vote on a series of 1% regional sales taxes to fund increased transportation infrastructure. If…
May 16, 2012
Evidence of the Fundamental Law of Traffic Congestion
Recently, the Georgia Department of Transportation has begun to allow motorists to use the emergency shoulder on segments of GA-400 as traffic lanes during rush hour. GDOT…