Economic fundamentals,policy responses,and state-level municipal bond sensitivity to COVID-19 prevalence

This paper conducts a state-by-state analysis of the financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the U.S. municipal bond market. Using panel regressions and state-by-state regressions, we find that the prevalence rates of the COVID-19 virus negatively impacted the aggregate performance of municipal bonds. The study also explored whether the disparities in the economic fundamentals of U.S. states, as well as the COVID-19 mitigation policies employed by each state, can explain the sensitivity of the state’s municipal bond to its COVID-19 prevalence rates. States with more desirable economic fundamentals and robust COVID-19 mitigation policies appeared to have higher COVID-19 sensitivities than states that do not. This finding may be due to a baseline effect, in which the higher levels of economic activities in these states also make them more susceptible to the deleterious effects of the stronger mitigation policies enacted by them.     

Local government centralization and corporate ESG performance: Evidence from China’s county-to-district reform

As a city–county consolidation with Chinese characteristics, China’s county-to-district (CtD) reform transfers a county’s autonomy to a city, thereby strengthening the administrative, decision-making, fiscal and other powers of the prefecture-level municipal government, which effectively enables the centralization of local governments. Based on this exogenous quasi-natural experiment, we use a difference-in-differences (DID) approach to empirically examine the impact of prefecture-level municipal government centralization on companies’ ESG performance. The results show that municipal government centralization can significantly promote corporate ESG performance, which represents environmental protection, social responsibility and corporate governance behavior. The mechanism analysis also shows that the CtD reform can address market segmentation, alleviate policy uncertainty and reduce rent-seeking, which further improves ESG performance.     

Marijuana liberalization and public finance: A capital market perspective on the passage of medical use laws

We find that the staggered passage of state-level laws that legalize marijuana for medical use increases states' borrowing costs by 7–9 basis points. Consistent with economic theory on substance use suggesting that marijuana legalization increases local consumption of the drug (by expanding its availability and reducing its perceived risks), we predict and find that increased consumption represents an important mechanism that explains the higher state bond spreads. We also show that following such laws’ passage, states incur higher marijuana-consumption-related expenditures, including for police, corrections, and public welfare.     

Moving beyond the transfer dyad: Exploring network influences on transfer effectiveness

There is a wealth of research analyzing sender-receiver transfers within multinational corporations focusing on the characteristics of (a) the sender, (b) the receiver, (c) the knowledge subject to transfer, and (d) the immediate transfer context. However, less is known about how networks external to the sender-receiver transfer dyad influence the outcomes of a transfer project. In this paper, we focus on the receiving subunits' internal and external networks and how embedded actors in these networks influence transfer effectiveness. More specifically, by means of an inductive multiple-case study, we explore how internal and external networks of subunits influence the effectiveness of capability transfers from headquarters to subunits. We study 18 transfers of the same capability from headquarters to subunits’ innovation projects. We theorize about how the capacity and configuration of receiving subunits’ networks can have a unique and detrimental influence on transfer effectiveness. The results of our study suggest that the receiver in a transfer project is not so much a specific unit as a network.     

Municipal fiber in the United States: A financial assessment

Despite growing interest in broadband provided by municipally owned and operated fiber-to-the-home networks, the academic literature has yet to undertake a systematic assessment of these projects' financial performance. To fill this gap, we utilize municipalities' official reports to offer an empirical evaluation of the financial performance of every municipal fiber project in the U.S. operating in 2010 through 2019. An analysis of the actual performance of the resulting fifteen-project panel dataset reveals that none of the projects generated sufficient nominal cash flow in the short run to maintain solvency without infusions of additional cash from outside sources or debt relief. Similarly, 87% have not actually generated sufficient nominal cash flow to put them on track to achieve long-run solvency. In addition, 73% generated negative nominal cash flow over the past three fiscal years, leaving them poorly positioned to make up their deficits and causing them to fall farther into debt. An assessment based on the net present value of these projects' operating cash flow indicates that 53% of projects would not be on track to breakeven even assuming the theoretical best-case performance in terms of capital expenditures and debt service. Close analysis of these projects’ performance reveals that revenue generation likely plays a more important role in generating cash flow than efficiency in construction costs or operating efficiency.     

Debt issuance incentives and creative accounting: Evidence from municipal mergers in Japan

Creative accounting has been a considerable problem in the field of governance and has caused serious economic issues. However, how governments determine the scale of creative accounting is unknown in the existing literature.We study whether a difference in the usage and the scale of creative accounting is determined by the intensity of the incentive to issue excessive debt. To study this, we focus on municipal mergers, a well-known setting wherein smaller merging municipalities have a stronger incentive to enjoy freeriding and issue debt since the debt burden will be shared and mainly owed by larger merging municipalities. This setting enables us to use the relative population size as a continuous treatment representing the strength of debt issuance incentives, whereas existing papers focused on binary treatments. Utilizing the data of Japanese municipal mergers, we find that governments with small relative populations, which have a strong debt issuance incentive, employed creative accounting more intensively than others. Moreover, we investigate how governments used the money obscured through creative accounting for the first time and find that it was not used to overcome financial difficulties nor increase politicians’ pecuniary gains but to increase resident welfare.     

Loss expectation and income shifting

This study examines the effects of expected losses on the income-shifting strategies of multinational corporations (MNCs). Using a set of worldwide MNC affiliates, this study first finds empirical evidence for ex ante adjustments of income-shifting strategies according to reverse incentives for potential losses. The results also support the existence of limited flexibility introduced by Hopland et al. (2018, 2021). Second, the estimates of income shifting measured using expected tax rate differences reveal that the traditional methodology of using statutory tax rate differences is subject to an estimation bias. This estimation bias varies depending on the loss expectation status and tax-rate levels of the affiliates.     

The Effect of Changes in Income Shifting on Affiliate Managers' Internal Reporting Decisions*†

This study examines the interplay between tax and internal reporting incentives among affiliates of multinational corporations (MNCs). MNCs face limited information flows that may prevent affiliates' performance metrics to be responsive immediately to changes in the firm's tax planning. Using granular data of affiliates belonging to MNCs from 21 European countries, our study provides new empirical evidence of affiliate internal reporting responses induced by changing tax plans. When high-tax-rate countries tighten income shifting rules, we first document that income shifting is reduced and low-tax-rate affiliates have less income. Second, we predict and document that managers of these low-tax-rate affiliates offset this decrease in profits by managing upwards a key performance metric: affiliate earnings. Our results are consistent with firms not quickly adjusting the affiliate managers' incentives in the face of changing tax planning strategies, and affiliates managing reported earnings to offset the effect of changes in the tax planning of the firm. Cross-sectional analyses provide further evidence consistent with the theory underlying the main tests. The results support the policy of tightening income shifting rules when the objective is to reduce income shifting, and firms' central management would benefit from considering the implications of changing tax plans on the assessment of local managers.