Reporting of Infrastructure Assets by State Governments

Earl D. Benson, Raymond B. Isleib and Barry R. Marks

Municipal Finance Journal, 2009, vol. 30, issue 1, 37 - 59

Abstract: In 1999, the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) adopted GASB Statement No. 34. This standard requires that governments capitalize their infrastructure assets. The standard allows a government to choose either to depreciate its infrastructure assets or to report them according to the “modified approach.” Under the modified approach, a government must preserve its infrastructure at its adopted condition. For governments that are in a weakened financial or political position, this requirement may be too taxing, so they may opt to depreciate their infrastructure assets. The results of this study suggest that the decision to select the modified approach is related to factors that imply a stronger financial and political system—specifically, higher population growth, a higher grade for the management of infrastructure assets from The Government Performance Project, no use of revenue bonds backed by fuel and motor vehicle taxes, lower lane miles per capita of the state’s highway system, and higher voter support for the current state governor.

Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/MFJ30010037 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/MFJ30010037 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucp:munifj:doi:10.1086/mfj30010037

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Municipal Finance Journal from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().