For years, public sector treasury has been treated like back-office work, important when something breaks, but largely invisible when it doesn't.
New research from the University of Chicago’s Center for Municipal Finance tells a different story.
This is the first systematic empirical study to connect treasury practice data with financial outcomes at scale for American state and local governments.
The discovery? The highest-performing treasury organizations borrowed at lower costs, carried stronger debt coverage, and managed their reserves more strategically than their peers, not by accident, but because of specific, repeatable practices that any finance team can adopt.
"A swing of 50 basis points on our assumption on investment earnings is the difference between cutting a position or not cutting a position." — John Ruggini, Finance Director, City of Wauwatosa, WI
What’s inside:
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Quantified financial outcomes: Survey data from 128 treasury professionals linked to real bond market and fiscal outcome data.
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The Leader profile: What the highest-performing cluster of treasury organizations actually does differently day to day.
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Four case studies: Kansas City, Atlanta, Wicomico County, and Wauwatosa present the qualitative story behind the numbers.
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The risks most teams are carrying: Staffing, spreadsheet dependence, and the institutional knowledge cliff mapped against the data.
