This paper studies the cross-section of expected municipal bond returns. We show that municipal bond yields contain reliable information about differences in expected municipal bond returns across states of issuance, duration range, and credit quality. Hence, using information embedded in those...

Local governments’ bond issues carry information about local macroeconomic outlook that is valuable for firms’ internal human capital allocation. We find that firms increase local employment by 0.14% after a one-standard-deviation increase in a county’s municipal bond issuance. These...

I present three findings on the effects of local unions on the municipal bond market. First, public- and private-sector unions play differential roles in capital markets: municipal bond issuers in areas with higher public-sector union density incur higher issuance costs and lower credit ratings....

Municipal bond ratings give investors information about bonds' default probabilities. They also affect societal objectives by altering the cost of public infrastructure but are not regulated. This paper explores the possibility that these ratings involve behavior analogous to redlining, which is...

We examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent monetary and fiscal policy actions on municipal bond market pricing. Using high-frequency trading data, we estimate key policy events at the peak of the crisis by focusing on a sample of bonds within a very narrow window of just...

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...