In 2018, California voters rejected Proposition 6, a ballot initiative that sought to repeal state gasoline taxes and vehicle fees enacted as part of the 2017 Road Repair and Accountability Act. We study the relationship between support for the proposition, political ideology and the economic burdens imposed by the Act. For every hundred dollars of annual per-household imposed costs, we estimate that support for the proposition rose by 3 - 9 percentage points. Notably, we find that the relationship between voting and the economic burden of the policy is seven times stronger in the most conservative tracts relative to the most liberal tracts. Since conservative areas in California and elsewhere tend to bear a higher burden from transportation and energy taxes than liberal areas, heterogeneity in the response to economic burdens has important implications for the popular support for environmental taxes and the ongoing policy debate about how to finance future road infrastructure.
Prime money market fundsrepresent a key vulnerability in the financial system. During the last 15 years, they have experienced two severe investor runs, in September 2008 and March 2020, both of which contributed to full-scale financial crises. The vulnerability of prime MMFs to runs and potential reforms to address the problem have attracted attention from academia, regulators, and the public. In this note, we examine the relationship between the investor base and behavior of prime MMFs between 2017 and 2021.