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...

Currently, there is no integrating theory which specifies why governmental pension plans are so significantly underfunded. In this study, we test several hypotheses concerning such underfunding in a cross-sectional regression model for state-administered pension plans. The conceptual model...

This paper provides an introduction to and a review of governmental capital markets based research. It updates earlier studies and focuses on recent methodological developments. Prior research is classified ac­cording to the type of data used, emphasizing special topics that have received...

Audits conducted under the 1984 Single Audit Act go beyond the traditional financial statement audit by placing substantial additional emphasis on the review and evaluation of internal controls and testing of compliance with laws and regulations. The General Accounting Office (GAO),...

The Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB, 1987, p. 12) has identified bond investors as a primary user group of government financial reports and is currently active in setting standards for pension accounting and reporting (GASB, 1986, 1988; lves, 1988). However, relatively little is known...

We evaluate the hypothesis that client monitoring is priced in the seasoned governmental bond market above and beyond other independent measures of local administration quality and the Big 8/Non-Big 8 dichotomy. Our results are generally consistent with the hypothesis

Considerable evidence exists that governmental accounting numbers are related empirically to bond risk and return measures. However, prior research does not preclude the possibility that accounting numbers merely reflect unobserved factors such as economic and political attributes impounded in...

This article explains how event methodology can be applied in municipal finance research. Event methodology examines the impact of specific events on the rate of return on financial securities and can be utilized to study the impact of political, legal, and economic events on municipal bond...

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...