We examine whether Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) financial statement disclosure alters local governments' economic decision-making. To do so, we exploit a recent GASB standard that eliminated differences in the disclosure requirements for county governments' pension obligations. The standard, GASB 68, had no effect on pension economics or the annual budget—it affected only whether and how information was presented on GASB financial statements. Using a broad hand-collected dataset, we document that counties that did not disclose information about their pension obligations before GASB 68 reduced public welfare expenditures, employment, and salary expenses relative to those that had disclosed such information. We conduct extensive field research and employ several cross-sectional analyses to conclude that the effects we document are in part driven by increased awareness of the financial costs of pension obligations by newly disclosing counties.

我们研究了政府会计准则委员会 (GASB) 的财务报表披露是否会改变地方政府的经济决策。为此，我们利用了最近的 GASB 标准，该标准消除了县政府养老金义务的披露要求差异。GASB 68 标准对养老金经济学或年度预算没有影响——它只影响信息是否以及如何在 GASB 财务报表中呈现。使用广泛的手工收集的数据集，我们记录了在 GASB 68 之前未披露有关其养老金义务信息的县相对于已披露此类信息的县减少了公共福利支出、就业和工资支出。