Does the Level of Funding of City Government Pension Liabilities Affect Tax-Exempt Bond Insurance Premiums and Credit Ratings?

Earl D. Benson and Barry R. Marks

Municipal Finance Journal, 2016, vol. 37, issue 1, 25 - 49

Abstract: This paper examines the association of the level of funding of city government pension fund liabilities with (1) the cost of municipal bond insurance and (2) the credit rating awarded on municipal debt, using data disclosed under Statement No. 34 of the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB 34) for insured general obligation debt issued by Texas cities. The analysis includes two different measures of pension underfunding to proxy for the level of funding. One of the measures is based on data from GASB 34. It finds that the level of pension funding is weakly related to the cost of municipal bond insurance and is strongly related to the credit rating on municipal debt.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/MFJ37010025 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/MFJ37010025 (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/mfj37010025

Access Statistics for this article

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