Eileen Norcross is the vice president of policy research and a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Her research focuses on questions of public finance and how economic institutions support or hamper economic resiliency and civil society. She specializes in fiscal federalism and institutions, state and local government finance, public sector pensions, public administration, and economic development. She is the lead author of “Ranking the States by Fiscal Condition: 2018 Edition.”