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As the management discussion and analysis (MD&A) section contains discretionary narrative disclosures regarding a government's yearly financial changes and status, the authors investigate several municipal debt market consequences of linguistic tone within these disclosures.

The authors textually analyze municipal MD&As with Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software and develop narrative tone measures based on existing financial-specific dictionaries. Using a final sample of 446 municipal bond issuances from 2012 to 2016, the authors modify the current bond regression models to examine the association between MD&A disclosure tone and future bond interest costs or rating disagreements.

This study’s empirical analysis suggests that more negative MD&A tone is associated with higher future debt costs and greater future disagreements among bond rating agencies.

Overall, the evidence implies that municipal bond stakeholders use the information in narrative disclosures when evaluating risk, but that the qualitative nature can introduce differences in interpretation between users. Furthermore, additional training in MD&A writing and further standard guidance in MD&A disclosures could improve the MD&A's informativeness for bond market decision-making and state-level monitoring.

This study is first to incorporate narrative tone measures into bond models in a governmental context.

This paper analyzes the impact of economic downturns on the revenue and expense sides of city financing for the period 2003 to 2009 using a convenience sample of the audited end of year financial reports for thirty midsized US cities. The analysis focuses on whether and how quickly and how extensively revenue and spending directions from past years are altered by recessions. A seven year series of Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) data serves to explore whether citiesʼ revenues and spending, especially the traditional property tax and core functions such as public safety and infrastructure withstood the brief 2001 and the persistent 2007 recessions? The findings point to consumption (spending) over stability (revenue minus expense) for the recession of 2007, particularly in 2008 and 2009.

The institutional conditions of primary care provision remain understudied in low- and middle-income countries. This study analyzes how primary care doctors cope with medical uncertainty in municipal clinics in urban India. As street-level bureaucrats, the municipal doctors occupy two roles simultaneously: medical professional and state agent. They operate under conditions that characterize health systems in low-resource contexts globally: inadequate state investment, weak regulation and low societal trust. The study investigates how, in these conditions, the doctors respond to clinical risk, specifically related to noncommunicable diseases (NCDs).

The analysis draws on year-long ethnographic fieldwork in Pune (2013–14), a city of three million, including 30 semi-structured interviews with municipal doctors.

Interpreting their municipal mandate to exclude NCDs and reasoning their medical expertise as insufficient to treat NCDs, the doctors routinely referred NCD cases. They expressed concerns about violence from patients, negative media attention and unsupportive municipal authorities should anything go wrong clinically.

The study contextualizes street-level service-delivery in weak institutional conditions. Whereas street-level workers may commonly standardize practices to reduce workload, here the doctors routinized NCD care to avoid the sociopolitical consequences of clinical uncertainty. Modalities of the welfare state and medical care in India – manifest in weak municipal capacity and healthcare regulation – appear to compel restraint in service-delivery. The analysis highlights how norms and social relations may shape primary care provision and quality.

The purpose of this paper is to use the waste materials in soil stabilization and low traffic volume roads so as to minimize the cost of subgrades for road construction along with solving disposal problems of waste materials thus protecting the environment.

An extensive laboratory study has been carried out on various samples of soil alone and along with waste materials such as municipal solid waste incineration ash and marble dust by adding cement to evaluate their effect on geotechnical characteristics of clayey soils.

The experimental study revealed that mixture of soil:Municipal solid waste incineration ash (MSWIA):Cement and soil:Marble dust (MD):Cement can be successfully used for the construction of low traffic volume roads. The differential free swell of the clayey soil is nil on adding MSWIA: cement and MD: cement to clayey soil in optimum amounts.

The research needs further experimentation on combining both MSWIA and MD together to stabilize clayey soil.

The research can be successfully used by government agencies in subgrades of low traffic roads.

The utilization of waste materials in the study solved the disposal problem of both waste materials, thus protecting the environment and giving quality living standards to people.

The use of MSWIA along with cement and use of MD along with cement for evaluating geotechnical properties has not been studied in the past. The present study is focussed on the use of both these materials along with cement in soil stabilization.

In Bangladesh (a middle-income and densely populated country) where socio-economic factors act badly on human activities during COVID-19. This research mainly focused on observing the socio-economic aspects of the Pandemic on human life between city and municipal areas.

This research relied on Khulna City Corporation (KCC) and Paikgacha Municipality of Bangladesh. A random sampling technique was adopted for choosing 622 stakeholders (318 in the city and 304 in the municipal area). Here, the socio-economic factors have been fixed based on the literature review and expert opinion. This study explored two mainstream social and economic issues affected by the Pandemic. Several statistical tests were performed to find the relationship among Socio-economic factors.

The study shows that the Pandemic caused great harm to city areas rather than municipal areas. The city is faced with tremendous pressure on the economic aspect as well. Besides, the pandemic affects savings, education sectors, food habits and other factors in both areas. The trip distribution also differs between the study areas and the mobility pattern shows that people migrated to rural areas from city space during the Pandemic.

This research will assist in focusing on a micro-level perspective in the future to analyze socio-economic changes. Moreover, it can help to point out the administrative prospects in the future.

This paper documents the Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB) 34 literature, primarily in the areas of (1) accountability and improved reporting, (2) government-wide financial statements and accrual accounting and (3) infrastructure asset capitalization and the modified approach. The paper also evaluates the state of the research, recognizes implications for practice and standard setting, identifies knowledge gaps and proposes avenues for future research.

The authors identified the articles in this narrative review by searching Google Scholar and EBSCO for the years 2000 through 2023, using the keywords GASB 34, government-wide financial statements, government fund statements, infrastructure assets and modified approach.

This review finds that GASB 34 requirements improved accountability and reporting, but GASB can still make improvements. The addition of the MD&A section requirement improved readability but placed a burden on preparers. Analysis of government-wide statement research indicates that the accrual-based Statement of Net Assets provides value in credit decisions, while the accrual-based Statement of Activities does not. The research on infrastructure accounting requirements shows limited adoption of the modified approach and some comparability issues with choices involving capitalization thresholds, baselines and asset management systems (AMSs). Based on this review, the authors also present suggestions to further this line of research.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first article that reviews over 20 years of GASB 34 related literature. The review and suggestions for future research are timely as GASB is in the process of reexamining some of GASB 34's requirements.

The authors surveyed city administrators in the six-county Chicago region to test an innovation management capacity process model. Innovation management capacity is conceptualized as the function of council-staff functionality, managerial leadership capacity, and staff team management. The empirical results from 220 city administrators in 53 cities support the hypothesis that the number of municipal innovations is positively correlated with innovation management capacity, controlling for structural, socioeconomic, and demographic variables. However, this study does not find a statistical relationship between innovation effectiveness and innovation management capacity. The authors posit two possible explanations for these results and propose an alternative innovation management capacity process model for testing in future research.

This chapter analyzes a geographic quasi-experiment embedded in a cluster-randomized experiment in Honduras. In the experiment, average treatment effects of conditional cash transfers on school enrollment and child labor were large – especially in the poorest experimental blocks – and could be generalized to a policy-relevant population given the original sample selection criteria. In contrast, the geographic quasi-experiment yielded point estimates that, for two of three dependent variables, were attenuated. A judicious policy analyst without access to the experimental results might have provided misleading advice based on the magnitude of point estimates. We assessed two main explanations for the difference in point estimates, related to external and internal validity.

Strategic planning in all sectors of government is currently experiencing greater use. Strategic planning in the federal government, for example, is now mandated and the emphasis is on “managing for results” (Roberts, 2000). At the same time, capital budgeting in all sectors of government is also receiving greater attention because of the recognition of greater need for attention to funding infrastructure. In this study, the relationship between the municipal strategic plan and the capital budget and their effect on financial performance is examined. Based on the analysis, the strategic plan, when connected to the capital budget, was found to have a statistically significant effect on selected aspects of municipal financial performance. The findings for practitioners indicate that strategic planning and capital budgeting are a major influence on financial performance and that the combination of capital budgeting and strategic planning constitutes a strategic decision-making process.