I study the effect of state fiscal monitoring on municipal governance. I focus on governance outcomes related to financial reporting quality, local corruption, political entrenchment, and the financial soundness of municipalities. I exploit the staggered adoption of fiscal monitoring policies,...

The usefulness of financial disclosures is a source of considerable debate in the municipal setting, given their lack of timeliness. This paper empirically examines the extent to which municipal financial disclosures have information content. Using the entire universe of annual financial...

Adaptation by cities is critical in reducing the inevitable impact of climate change. Here we present the first large-sample evidence of cities' adaptation to elevated flood risk, a key consequence of climate change. We construct and analyze a new linguistic measure of adaptation extracted from...

We examine changes in cross-country financial statement comparability around mandatory IFRS adoption and the effects of these changes on firms' information environments, as captured by analyst properties and bid-ask spreads. First, we show that cross-country earnings comovement is negatively...