In public finance, as in any field of government administration, too often it’s tempting to think of academia and the people who do the hard everyday work of governing as separate spheres, orbiting each other with little being shared to inform both research and practice. But it does happen, and it’s a growing phenomenon that can’t be nurtured enough.
So it was encouraging to see genuine sharing in action at the recent annual research conference of the Association for Budgeting and Financial Management (ABFM), where I presented research on artificial intelligence readiness in local government finance and facilitated a panel on reimagining fiscal federalism. What stuck with me was how much of the rest of the program was built the same way: academics interested in and engaged with those who actually have to balance a budget and manage a government’s finances.
The clearest example came when the conference's first plenary session featured Anthony Williams, who as the District of Columbia’s chief financial officer in the 1990s pulled the capital city out of its fiscal control-board era and later served two terms as its mayor. Governing honored Williams as a Public Official of the Year in 1997 for that fiscal turnaround. Nearly three decades later he was describing it again, this time to a room of researchers who mostly study fiscal distress through data sets and case studies.
ABFM has always straddled both worlds. Its journal, Public Budgeting and Finance, is a standard academic outlet, and most conference sessions are still built around working papers headed for peer review. But the event also included a dedicated training track for federal budget analysts, and this year's conference theme, “Shared Challenges, Shared Resources: Managing Public Budgeting and Finance in a Multi-Level System,” was built explicitly around governments having to solve problems together, not around any single research method or academic subfield.
That framing showed up in the research itself. This year's sessions leaned hard into problems finance officers are living with right now rather than settled ones: how cities should tax and incentivize the data centers reshaping their commercial tax base; how state Medicaid programs are adjusting to new federal limits on provider-tax financing; how overlapping city, county, school and special-district governments stack a cumulative tax burden no single one of them can see whole; and what early-warning signs predict which cities will tip into fiscal stress before it shows up in a credit-rating downgrade.
These weren't retrospective case studies built years after the fact. They were researchers working the same live problems finance officers are working right now, often before a state association or a practitioner journal has caught up to the question.
The clearest institutional signal came from ABFM’s annual awards. The Scholarly Engagement Award, for example, exists specifically to recognize work whose primary audience is practitioners rather than other academics: advising projects, conducting training workshops, and building databases and other tools, alongside more traditional research judged on its contribution to practice and its clarity as much as its originality.
This year's winner, Whitney Afonso of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has built her career on local sales tax policy: what happens to a small city's tax base after a game-changing online sales tax ruling, or when an Amazon distribution center opens nearby. Those are the kinds of granular, state-specific questions local finance officers and state revenue departments actually call scholars about.
Bridging research and practice matters in any year. It matters more in a year when the ground is moving at warp speed. Another conference plenary made the same point on a faster-moving question, putting state credit-rating analysts, tax-policy officials and researchers on the same stage to work through the same shifting federal-state-local fiscal risks in real time, rather than each group working it separately and comparing notes years later.
When conditions shift this quickly, the usual lag between a research finding and a peer-reviewed publication, often two or three years by the time a paper clears review, is itself a cost. A room where practitioners and researchers are staring at the same trend at the same time is one way that lag gets shorter.
None of this means finance officers should start reading working papers for fun. But a few habits can close the gap without much effort:
• Track conference programs, not just journals. Much of the freshest research on live problems such as data center taxation, provider-tax financing and overlapping-government burden is a year or more from formal publication; a conference program is often the first place it surfaces.
• Watch for practitioner-facing translations. The Government Finance Officers Association's (GFOA) Government Finance Review carries academic findings into practice-ready form, and GFOA's Public Finance Journal (which I co-edit) is open-access and requires every accepted paper to show relevance to practitioners, not just scholars. Both are worth following regularly.
• Ask before assuming no one has studied it. When a state association is wrestling with a specific, thorny financing question, there is a decent chance a scholar somewhere already has data on it. Reaching out directly is usually faster than waiting for the finding to trickle down on its own.
• Nominate, don't just consume. Honors like ABFM's Scholarly Engagement Award exist because the field wants more work built for practitioners, not less. A strong advising project or training tool from your own office is exactly the kind of thing worth putting forward for this kind of recognition.
• Reach out to local universities. Many public-serving universities have programs in policy, urban studies and/or public administration. Instructors and researchers are always looking to partner with local officials.
The conference I came home from made a case, deliberately, that the two sides of this field, the people who study fiscal management and the people who practice it, do their best work when they are in the same room. It is worth building more rooms like that.
Governing's opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing's editors or management.