Overview of U.S. State and Local Government Financial Reporting: A Reference for Academic Research

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to encourage and support academic research related to U.S. state and local government financial reporting. We provide an overview of U.S. state and local governments and their financial reporting, discuss sources of government data available to researchers, review key streams of academic research on governmental financial reporting, and suggest opportunities for future research in this area.

The Information Content of Municipal Financial Statements: Large-sample Evidence

“…Our paper takes an important step toward understanding the role of financial disclosures in the municipal bond market-a question that has not been recently addressed in the relatively young municipal bond literature (Kim, Plumlee, and Stubben, 2021). Prior studies have shown that investors respond to credit events (e.g., Ivanov et al, 2022;Cornaggia, Cornaggia, and Israelsen, 2018), but not to financial disclosures, either because the reports are noisy signals or because the information is preempted by timelier signals (e.g., Ingram et al, 1989;Reck and Wilson, 2006).…”