We argue that the tax-exempt status of municipal bonds provides little or no subsidy to capital investment by communities. Instead, the tax exemption simply provides arbitrage opportunities to high and low tax bracket individuals while leaving individuals in intermediate tax brackets essentially...

This paper uses data from 1988 federal income tax returns, which asked taxpayers to report their tax-exempt interest income as an information item, to analyze the distribution of tax-exempt asset holdings. More than three quarters of the tax-exempt debt held by households was held by those with...

This paper considers ways in which federal tax policy affects municipal asset and debt holdings. The tax treatment of municipal bonds and income creates an arbitrage opportunity for communities to issue tax exempt debt and invest in financial assets. I present evidence that suggests the rules in...

This paper presents a model of debt finance at the sub-national level from which municipal bond supply equations are derived. Federal tax considerations are shown to be important determinants of the price entering the bond supply equation. Using data on 40 state governments over a seven year...

This paper proposes an alternative to the traditional model for explaining the spread between taxable and tax-exempt bond yields. This alternative model is a special case of a general class of clientele models of portfolio choice and asset market equilibrium. In particular, we consider a setting...

A new model is proposed for representinq the term to maturity structure of interest rates at a point in time.The model produces humped, monotonic and S-shaped yield curves using four parameters. Conditional on a time decay parameter, estimates of the other three are obtained by least squares....

We examine whether there is a flight-to-liquidity premium in Treasury bond prices by comparing them with prices of bonds issued by Refcorp, a U.S. Government agency, which are guaranteed by the Treasury. We find a large liquidity premium in Treasury bonds, which can be more than fifteen percent...

The sensitivity of long-term rates to short-term rates represents a puzzle for standard macro-finance models. Post-FOMC announcement drift in Treasury markets after Federal Funds target changes contributes to the excess sensitivity of long rates. Mutual fund investors respond to the salience of...

We investigate whether bonds span the volatility risk in the U.S. Treasury market, as predicted by most 'affine' term structure models. To this end, we construct powerful and model-free empirical measures of the quadratic yield variation for a cross-section of fixed-maturity zero-coupon bonds...

In 1933, the U.S. unilaterally restructured its debt by declaring that it would no longer honor the gold clause in Treasury securities. We study the effects of the abrogation of the gold clause on sovereign debt markets, the Treasury's ability to issue new debt, investors' willingness to hold...