Why municipalities fail: Implications for uncertainty disclosures

Why Nations Fail (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012), a book widely and favorably reviewed by the business press (MacLeod 2013), identifies political and economic factors that allow some jurisdictions to prosper while other, often geographically and culturally similar, jurisdictions languish. The book's propositions are based on detailed case studies of countries across time and continents. The study summarized here follows a similar approach by relying on hand-collected evidence of municipalities that failed in the sense they ceased to exist as separate legal entities.¹ This evidence is used as a basis for identifying misconceptions about governments as going concerns, redefining what it means for a government to be a going concern, suggesting ways to improve disclosures related to going concern uncertainty (as redefined), and identifying questions for future policy-relevant research.