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...

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