A substantial fraction of local governments refinance their long-term debt with significant delays - resulting in sizable losses. Using data from 2001 to 2018, we estimate that U.S. municipals lost over $31 billion from this delayed refinancing, whereas the entire U.S. corporate sector, facing...

This paper demonstrates that capital markets take surrounding environments in the states into consideration when determining prices on local debt, above and beyond the underlying features of municipal bonds. We empirically show that corruption premium exists in the US municipal bond market....