We explore determinants and implications of abnormal investment by local government politicians. We focus on two types of political influence hypothesized to drive capital asset investment: federal congressional influence and state government trifectas, whereby one political party holds the...

We find that mean municipal debt costs are greater following financial restatement disclosures. Comparisons of the relative use of municipal debt, and of the use of unsecured versus secured debt, corroborate that financial restatements increase the cost of municipal debt financing. Additional...

We investigate relations between the textual content of municipal disclosures and future internal control quality. Specifically, we examine whether the linguistic tone of municipal management discussion and analysis (MD&A) disclosures is associated with the likelihood of future internal control...

We investigate the determinants of content changes in municipal management discussion and analysis (MD&A) disclosures in terms of economic, governance, and regulatory characteristics. Similar to Brown and Tucker (2011), we calculate a difference score based on the degree to which municipal MD&As...

Purpose: As the management discussion and analysis (MD&A) section contains discretionary narrative disclosures regarding a government's yearly financial changes and status, the authors investigate several municipal debt market consequences of linguistic tone within these disclosures....

We investigate whether the presence of municipal audit committees is associated with internal control quality in the municipal setting. The evidence shows that only 20% of municipalities in our sample voluntarily maintained an audit committee during the sample period of 2001 through 2004. Our...

We investigate whether municipal financial managers face labor market consequences following accounting restatements. The evidence suggests that municipalities that disclose accounting restatements are more likely to experience turnover in the top financial manager position than a control sample...

We examine whether unfunded public pension liabilities are associated with citizen oversight through legislative and electoral means in local governments. Our focus on municipal pension plans is timely and relevant, given the prevalence of underfunded pension plans and GASB's recently issued...