Dr. Pengju Zhang's Paper on Home Rule Earns Most Downloaded Distinction

Dr. Pengju Zhang's paper, entitled "Impact of Home Rule on Municipal Boundary and Fiscal Expansion: Evidence from Texas," stood out as one of the most downloaded papers during its first year of publication among work published in 2022, according to the publisher, Wiley. The co-authored paper, which previously received the Best Paper Award from Midwest Public Affairs Conference in 2022, appeared in The Journal of Regional Science (JRS) and leverages variation in the adoption of home rule charters in Texas to provide the first empirical examination of whether home rule adoption causes municipal boundary expansion and fiscal growth.

Dr. Zhang is an associate professor and the director of international programs in the School of Public Affairs and Administration (SPAA) at Rutgers University–Newark. He specializes in state and local public finance, local government studies, education finance and policy, and quantitative analysis, and his work has appeared in many peer-reviewed journals.