Recent high-profile attempts to repudiate municipal bonds break from what had become a stable American norm of honoring public debt. In the nineteenth century, though, hundreds of cities, towns, and counties walked away from their bonds. The Supreme Court's handling of repudiation in the...

We study the approximately 34% of local municipal bond issues that are unrated. Results show that issuers are less likely to obtain ratings for smaller issues, negotiated offerings, and bonds with high proxies for risk such as coming from areas with low property values and personal income. Using...

This paper reveals a non-monotonic impact of local mutual funds on municipal bond issuance. Offering yields are higher in states with open-end municipal bond funds, and with larger aggregate fund size. However, holding local fund size constant, yields are decreasing in the number of funds. Such...

This paper tests several competing models of municipal bond market equilibrium. It analyzes the influence of changes in both personal and corporate tax reforms on the yield spread between taxable and tax-exempt interest rates. The findings suggest that changes in personal income tax rates have...

We present three findings on the effects of environmental regulation on the municipal bond market. First, yields increase (decrease) after a new standard is proposed (finalized), consistent with the resolution of regulatory uncertainty. Second, around annual compliance announcements, yields fall...