We leverage a national panel of US municipalities to show that behavioral finance helps explain the number of months of expenses that municipalities save in cash and investment reserves. We hypothesize that municipal managers may be using numerical anchoring based on historical values to target the number of months of savings to hold and that they may also be engaged in social learning to target months of savings based on the behavior of neighboring municipalities. We test for these effects by combining two innovative techniques, a two-stage regression designed to test for anchoring of present financial values based on theoretically unimportant historical values, and a measure of the spatial autocorrelation of savings to test for social learning. The results suggest that, in deciding how much to save, municipal managers are influenced by the levels of savings they held in the past and the savings levels of their neighbors, and that they underreact to changes in theoretically relevant economic fundamentals. Further tests also suggest that the smallest cities by population are more influenced by the behavior of their neighbors than their past savings, whereas the largest cities show the opposite result, effectively choosing themselves as their own role models.

中文翻译：

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做我们去年所做的事情，但不要偏离太远：市政现金储备的行为公共财政方法

我们利用美国市政当局的全国小组来表明，行为金融学有助于解释市政当局在现金和投资储备中节省的费用月数。我们假设市政管理者可能会使用基于历史值的数字锚定来确定要保存的储蓄月数，并且他们也可能会参与社会学习，以根据邻近城市的行为来确定储蓄的月数。我们通过结合两种创新技术来测试这些影响，一种是两阶段回归，旨在测试基于理论上不重要的历史值的当前财务价值的锚定，另一种是衡量储蓄的空间自相关性，以测试社会学习。结果表明，在决定储蓄多少时，市政管理者会受到他们过去的储蓄水平和邻居的储蓄水平的影响，并且他们对理论上相关的经济基本面的变化反应不足。进一步的测试还表明，人口规模最小的城市更容易受到邻居行为的影响，而不是过去储蓄的影响，而最大的城市则表现出相反的结果，有效地选择自己作为自己的榜样。