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...

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...

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

Prior research (Wallace, 1981 Wilson and Howard, 1984) has implicitly as­sumed that the impact of accounting information on municipal borrowing costs is the same across all bond rating groups. This paper provides empirical evidence that the demand for accounting information is a function of...

State and local governments are exempt from the auditing regulations of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Nevertheless, state governments expend considerable resources on financial, legal compliance, and operational audits. The objective of this paper is to identify the relationships...