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...

Although the goal of government is to maintain or improve citizens' well-being, govern­mental commitments are subject to fiscal constraints. Given constraints on resources, governments need to "live within their means" (GASB 1987, para. 59). Concepts Statement No. 1 (GASB 1987, para. 61)...

State and local governments are not subject to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulations requiring compliance with generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). It was only in 1980 that Standard & Poor's issued a policy statement indicating a failure to conform with GAAP would be...

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...

While financial statement auditing dominates the market for corporate auditing, internal controls and operational auditing appear to be emphasized in governmental markets. The size of the governmental audit budget (beyond the minimum level prescribed by generally accepted auditing standards) is...

Unlike the corporate sector, detailed estimates of unfunded pension liabilities for most local governments are not available. Thus, prior research on the association between unfunded pension liabilities and municipal creditor decisions (Copeland and Ingram 1983; Marks and Raman 1985) has implicitly...

This article examines the association between state regulation of accounting practices and municipal borrowing costs. The results demonstrate that stringent accounting regulations do have an effect on borrowing costs after abstracting the effect of other explanatory variables. The direction of...

Available evidence suggests that state and local government pension plans may be substantially underfunded. The capitalization of these unfunded obligations in borrowing costs is an important public policy issue, since noncapitalization may lead to the misallocation of credit and stimulate the...

In this paper, we examine the importance of the Bureau of Census' pension information for both municipal (city) and state borrowing costs in the new issue (primary) market using a variable (computed from the Bureau of Census data) which has been found to be correlated with the amount of unfunded...