Approximately 4800 municipal bond issuers defaulted on interest or principal payments during the Great Depression. Although municipal bond defaults have been quite rare over the last 70 years, some commentators have suggested that another large wave of municipal bond defaults will occur in the...

In response to a request from the California Debt and Investment Advisory Commission, we propose a model to estimate default probabilities for bonds issued by cities. The model can be used with financial data available in Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports that cities are required to...

Using a system of equations approach, this paper empirically tests the impact of credit quality, asset maturity, and other issuer and issue characteristics on the maturity of municipal bonds. We find that under conditions of lower information asymmetry that prevails in the municipal sector,...

This is the first paper that decomposes the municipal bond spread into its default and liquidity risk components in Japan's market. The tax effect is identified using institutional information about Japan, which enables us to simplify the model drastically. To overcome the availability of the...