Municipal bonds trade in opaque, decentralized broker-dealer markets in which price information is costly to gather. Whether dealers in such a market operate competitively is an empirical issue, but a difficult one to study because data in such markets is generally not centrally recorded. We...

We study trading and prices in newly issued municipal bonds. Municipals, which trade in decentralized, broker-dealer markets, are underpriced when issued, but unlike equities the average price rises slowly over a period of several days. We document high levels of price dispersion in newly issued...