I examine how past interactions among investment banks, financial advisors, and bond attorneys - known here as "debt management networks" - drive pricing and risk-taking on new issue municipal securities. This analysis is motivated by the question of whether centralization improves or distorts...

I examine how liquidity risk affects municipal bond pricing. Liquidity has become a central concern to municipal bond investors, issuers, and regulators since the recent collapse of the monoline municipal bond insurers. The results show that liquidity risk had a minimal effect on yield spreads...

I examine three cases where local governments, encouraged by the fiscal austerity of the Great Recession, changed how they identified and selected capital projects. The central question is whether these changes institutionalized a more “strategic" outlook in the capital improvement planning...

I develop and test a new explanation for the variation in slack resource levels. That explanation is based on the "ratcheting" dynamic, or the claim that government budgets expand because past overspending is impounded in future budgeted expenditures. I test the salience of the ratcheting...

Questions of how public organizations control and manage resources have been relegated to an insular subfield of contemporary public management. This is both unfortunate and unnatural because insights from the study of budgeting and financial management have traditionally been a driving force of...

Local governments tend to keep large amounts of slack nancial resources to hedge against risk and uncertainty. To date, there has been little empirical research on whether those slack holdings are inadequate, adequate, or perhaps excessive relative to those risks and uncertainties. I address...

I examine the relevance to credit analysts and investors of information presented in the government-wide financial reports of municipalities. Government-wide, accrual-basis measures such as those required by GASB Statement 34 are potentially useful for assessing local government credit quality...

Most municipal bonds are sold through negotiated underwriting, despite a large body of evidence that competitive underwriting usually produces more efficient, transparent, and equitable outcomes. In this paper I use data on several million municipal bond transactions to test the claim that...