ABSTRACT
Traditionally, state and local policy makers offered tax abatements, tax reductions, and other fiscal incentive packages to attract business firms as a way to reverse general economic decline or to redevelop specific, poor, blighted areas. The incentives responded to demand from firms recruited by policy makers. Finance officials designed and constructed the incentives and applied an agency logic in deciding what to do. This chapter explores the agency logic in an intensely pro-business context. The research presented here looks unfavorably on the products and results of finance officials as agents.
