题目：The Freedom of Information Act and Government Financing Costs
时间：2023年10月23日（周一）9:30-12:30
地点： 浙江大学紫金港校区管理学院A423
主讲人： 苏黎新教授，香港理工大学会计与金融学院院长
主讲人简介：
Professor Nancy Lixin Su is the Head and full professor at the School of Accounting and Finance, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Before re-joining PolyU, she has taught at Lingnan University.
Prof Su has a broad research interest in disclosure, reporting, and auditing. She has also worked creatively across accounting, supply chain, and social network. Professor Su has published in prestigious accounting journals, such as Journal of Accounting and Economics, The Accounting Review, and in other business journals, including Management Science and Journal of Business Ethics. She is a co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary Accounting and Economics and has served as the executive editor of China Accounting and Finance Review as well as a special issue editor of Accounting Horizons. She has also served as an examiner for other Hong Kong universities as well as the investigation panel of HKICPA.
讲座摘要：
In the United States, each state has implemented an information openness law, commonly known as the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), granting any person or organization the right to request access to records from any government branch.
However, the level of government transparency offered under the FOIA varies across states and over time. We contend that FOIA offers access to government records by the public, thereby reducing information asymmetry between municipal bond investors and the municipal government and facilitating the public monitoring of governments. By employing staggered treatments to FOIA revisions and a stacked regression design, we find that following positive FOIA revisions, municipal borrowing costs, measured by offering yield and tax-adjusted offering spread, decrease significantly. The effect is present for institutional and retail investors, but the reduction is greater for retail investors, who are likely to benefit more from access to government records. Our robustness tests support that the effect is causal and not driven by underlying macroeconomic conditions. The effect is also more pronounced in counties with lower levels of social capital or lower newspaper coverage, and more pronounced for bonds with lower credit rating or longer maturity. Overall, this paper documents the benefits of FOIA in public finance and contributes to the municipal bonds and information acquisition literature.
