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...

Municipal bonds are often "advance refunded." Bonds that are not yet callable are defeased by creating a trust that pays the interest up to the call date, and pays the call price. New debt, generally at lower interest rates, is issued to fund the trust. Issuing new securities generally has zero...

For over two centuries, the municipal bond market has been a source of systemic risk, which returned early in the Covid-19 downturn when borrowing from securities markets became costly for many private and public entities, and some found it difficult to borrow at all. Indeed, just before the Fed...

This paper presents new evidence on the effect of state fiscal institutions, particularly balanced-budget rules and restrictions on state debt issuance, on the yields on state general obligation bonds. We analyze information from the Chubb Relative Value Survey, which contains relative...

This paper identifies the impact of fluctuations in the supply of capital from mutual funds on municipal bond financing and makes three contributions to the literature. First, we develop an identification strategy based on the Morningstar rating methodology at the moment that funds reach 5 years...

Climate change is increasing the frequency of natural disasters, which could make municipal bonds a riskier asset class. We study the effects of natural disasters on municipal bond returns, exploiting the repeat sales approach to overcome the challenge that municipal bonds trade extremely...

This paper shows that product design shapes search frictions and that intermediaries leverage this channel to increase their rents in the context of the U.S. municipal bond market. The majority of bonds are designed via negotiations between a local government and its underwriter. They are then...

Municipal bond markets begin pricing sea level rise (SLR) exposure risk in 2013, coinciding with upward revisions to worst-case SLR projections and accompanying uncertainty around these projections. The effect is larger for long-maturity bonds and is not solely driven by near-term flood risk. We...

We study the valuation of state-issued tax-exempt municipal bonds and find that there are significant convenience premia in their prices. These premia parallel those identified in Treasury markets. We find evidence that these premia are tax related. Specifically, the premia are related to...

Interest paid by U.S. state and local bonds is tax-exempt, making these bonds attractive to investors - though a tax rule limits arbitrage opportunities by restricting associated interest expense deductions. Prior to 1986, U.S. banks were not subject to the interest deduction limitation, making...