In the municipal bond market, announcements of changes in general obligation bond ratings by the rating agencies are typically made con­currently with announcements of new bond issues. Hence, prior research on the information content of municipal bond rating change announcements is subject to...

The most visible credit market measure of the fiscal health of a municipality is the credit rating. In this article we ask whether the credit rating fully incorporates the fiscal stresses faced by municipal governments. We utilize state "tax effort" as a measure of the fiscal stress faced by a...

Pension data for local governments are generally unavailable. Hence, prior re­search has relied on pension ratios as proxies for underfunding. In this paper, we utilize data from Pennsylvania where local governments are required to report unfunded obligations on an actuarial basis to a state...

This paper provides an empirical test of the association between the MFOA Certificate of Conformance and creditor decisions in the market for new municipal bond issues. We report that the certificate does have information content for creditor decisions, particularly for medium quality bonds

Given the "pervasive and powerful influence" of published ratings, an attempt was made to explain municipal bond ratings using information normally obtainable from financial reports. It appears that rating assignments are more closely associated with the flow of liquid financial resources from...

Municipal bond rating changes can have significant consequences for both borrowers and investors. Multivariate discriminant analysis (MDA) was used to examine whether financial ratios could discriminate between cities that had their ratings upgraded or downgraded from an A rating. In addition,...