The Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) under Concepts Statement No. 4, Elements of Financial Statements (2007a) introduced two new elements to government financial reporting: deferred outflows of resources and deferred inflows of resources. Given the large size of the municipal bond market, and the debate surrounding the GASB’s development of financial reporting requirements for these new elements, we investigate the associated changes to governments’ financial statements and the extent to which these changes may have influenced municipal borrowing costs.

Our findings indicate that many governments were impacted by the introduction of the new financial statement elements, and the amounts reported as deferred outflows (inflows) of resources are negatively (positively) associated with interest costs on newly issued general obligation bonds. These findings should be informative to the GASB and users of municipal financial reports, such as bond market participants. Overall, our findings counter arguments made that the new financial statement elements would create needless complexity and confusion by suggesting a potential benefit of the financial statement changes.

政府会计准则委员会 (GASB) 根据第 4 号概念声明，财务报表要素(2007a) 为政府财务报告引入了两个新要素：递延资源流出和递延资源流入。鉴于市政债券市场规模庞大，以及围绕 GASB 针对这些新要素制定财务报告要求的争论，我们调查了政府财务报表的相关变化以及这些变化可能对市政借贷成本产生的影响程度。

我们的调查结果表明，许多政府受到新财务报表要素的引入的影响，报告为递延流出（流入）资源的金额与新发行的一般义务债券的利息成本呈负（正）相关。这些发现应该为 GASB 和市政财务报告的用户（例如债券市场参与者）提供信息。总体而言，我们的研究结果反驳认为，新的财务报表要素会暗示财务报表变更的潜在好处，从而造成不必要的复杂性和混乱。