The Competitive Impact of Commercial Bank Underwriting on the Market for Municipal Revenue Bonds

This paper examines the impact of commercial bank entry in the market for municipal revenue bonds. We show that issues underwritten by commercial banks have lower underwriter spreads but not lower yields relative to issues underwritten by nonbank investment firms. In particular, this is more significant for non-investment-grade bonds underwritten by commercial banks. Our results are consistent with the interpretation that bank entry has resulted in increased competition in the municipal revenue bond market and that the lower yields observed for bank-underwritten commercial bonds may be due to banks having private information. Overall, our results suggest that policy changes leading to the relaxation of restrictive provisions concerning bank underwriting of municipal revenue bonds have had beneficial effects.     

On the Value of Municipal Bond Insurance: An Empirical Analysis

Using a large sample of municipal bond data from 2001 to 2010 in the U.S., this paper documents the time variation of the value of municipal bond insurance, estimated from the insured and uninsured bonds yield at issue differentials. We find that insured municipal bonds carry significant lower yields at issue compared to those of the equivalent uninsured bonds before 2008. However, this cost saving disappeared with the aftermath of the subprime credit crisis. We find that the supply of bonds and the level of market interest rates to have significant positive impacts on the time‐varying value of bond insurance. We also detect asymmetric response of these yield differentials to rises and declines of market interest rates. Economic intuition suggests that the value of municipal bond insurance is a function of business cycles but our tests support the contrary, which may be explained by the habitat preference of municipal bonds issues.     

Secondary Trading Costs in the Municipal Bond Market

Using new econometric methods, we separately estimate average transaction costs for over 167,000 bonds from a 1‐year sample of all U.S. municipal bond trades. Municipal bond transaction costs decrease with trade size and do not depend significantly on trade frequency. Also, municipal bond trades are substantially more expensive than similar‐sized equity trades. We attribute these results to the lack of bond market price transparency. Additional cross‐sectional analyses show that bond trading costs increase with credit risk, instrument complexity, time to maturity, and time since issuance. Investors, and perhaps ultimately issuers, might benefit if issuers issued simpler bonds.     

Orange County Bankruptcy: Financial Contagion in the Municipal Bond and Bank Equity Markets

We examine the spillover wealth effects of the Orange County, California bankruptcy announcement in December 1994 on municipal bonds, municipal bond funds, and bank stocks. This bankruptcy is prominent because of unprecedented losses and because it was caused by a highly leveraged derivatives strategy rather than a shortage of tax revenues and excess spending. We find contagion in the bond market with significantly negative abnormal returns for municipal bond funds without direct exposure to Orange County and for non‐Orange County municipal bonds. In addition, our findings suggest the contagion spills over to the common stocks of investment and commercial banks that deal in or use derivatives; however, the equities of banks unexposed to derivatives are not affected.     

Distance Still Matters: Evidence from Municipal Bond Underwriting

Using a sample of municipal bond offerings, I find that "local"investment banks have substantial comparative and absolute advantagesover nonlocal counterparts-–locals charge lower fees andsell bonds at lower yields. Local investment banks’ strongestcomparative advantage is at underwriting bonds with higher creditrisk and bonds not rated by rating agencies. These findingssuggest that high-risk bonds and nonrated bonds are more difficultto evaluate and market, and that investment banks with a localpresence are better able to assess "soft" information and placedifficult bond issues.     

Liquidity,default, taxes,and yields on municipal bonds

We examine the effects of liquidity, default and personal taxes on the relative yields of Treasuries and municipals using a generalized model with liquidity risk. The municipal yield model includes liquidity as a state factor. Using a unique transaction dataset, we estimate the liquidity risk of municipals and its effect on bond yields. Empirical evidence shows that municipal bond yields are strongly affected by all three factors. The effects of default and liquidity risk on municipal yields increase with maturity and credit risk. Liquidity premium accounts for about 9–13% of municipal yields for AAA bonds, 9–15% for AA/A bonds and 8–19% for BBB bonds. A substantial portion of the maturity spread between long- and short-maturity municipal bonds is attributed to the liquidity premium. Ignoring the liquidity risk effect thus results in a severe underestimation of municipal bond yields. Conditional on the effects of default and liquidity risk, we obtain implicit tax rates very close to the statutory tax rates of high-income individuals and institutional investors. Furthermore, these implicit income tax rates are quite stable across bonds of different maturities. Results show that including liquidity risk in the municipal bond pricing model helps explain the muni puzzle.     

Permanent trading impacts and bond yields

We analyse four years of transaction data for euro-area sovereign bonds traded on the MTS electronic platforms. In order to measure the informational content of trading activity, we estimate the permanent price response to trades. We not only find strong evidence of information asymmetry in sovereign bond markets, but also show the relevance of information asymmetry in explaining the cross-sectional variations of bond yields across a wide range of bond maturities and countries. Our results confirm that trades of more recently issued bonds and longer maturity bonds have a greater permanent effect on prices. We compare the price impact of trades for bonds across different maturity categories and find that trades of French and German bonds have the highest long-term price impact in the short maturity class, whereas trades of German bonds have the highest permanent price impact in the long maturity class. More importantly, we study the cross-section of bond yields and find that after controlling for conventional factors, investors demand higher yields for bonds with larger permanent trading impact. Interestingly, when investors face increased market uncertainty, they require even higher compensation for information asymmetry.     

交易所国债期限风险溢价的实证研究

本文考察了上海证券交易所国债期限风险溢价的时间变化特征及决定因素。实证结果显示，债券剩余期限越长，平均风险溢价越高；通过对不同期限债券组合的风险溢价序列建立回归模型，发现长短期利差及风险溢价的前期值对中长期债券期限风险溢价的时变性具有明显的解释能力。     

Bond Insurance: What Is Special About Munis?

Close to 50% of municipal bonds are prepackaged with insurance at the time of issue. We offer a tax‐based rationale for the emergence of third‐party insurance of tax‐exempt bonds. We argue that insurance adds value as it allows a third party to become, in a probabilistic sense, an issuer of tax‐exempt securities. Insurance however reduces value by eliminating the possibility of a capital tax loss. While the net benefit from insurance increases with bond maturity, the benefit may not increase monotonically with default risk. We also provide empirical evidence supportive of the model's predictions.     

The effect of bank relationships on bond spreads: Additional evidence from Japan

This study investigates the impact of bank relationships on bond spreads using data on Japanese bond-issuing firms. In doing so, it extends the existing literature, which found that bank relationships decrease bond spreads, consistent with the view that bond investors benefit from bank monitoring, but this is not the case for investment-grade bonds in the US. This study provides evidence that the influence on the yields of investment-grade bonds varies with the type of bank relationship. In this research, a main bank is defined as a bank that is not merely the top lender to a firm but also one of the ten largest shareholders, while firms that borrow money from banks but have no ties with main banks are considered to have support bank relationships. The regression results show that although main bank relationships are not systematically associated with the yields of investment-grade bonds, support bank relationships are positively associated with them. It is suggested that, even for a sample of investment-grade bonds, a specific type of bank relationship affects bond spreads and the association between them is consistent with the view that bond investors are concerned about the hold-up problem posed by banks.     

Bond Yields,Taxes, and the Dimensions of Default Risk

This work develops and empirically estimates models of bond yields subject to default risk. Parameters for the probability of survival and the recovery rate subsequent to default are included in a model of corporate bond yields that allow a study of interactions among them. The municipal version of the model includes the tax rate as an additional factor. Empirical evidence is found that supports the notion that both dimensions of default, considered jointly, are related to bond quality. In addition, statistically significant differences in tax rates suggest that higher tax rates are associated with higher grade municipal bonds.     

债务结构优化与企业创新——基于企业债券融资视角的研究

本文在我国保持宏观杠杆率基本稳定及实施创新驱动发展战略的现实背景下,从债券融资的视角,探讨债务结构优化对企业创新的影响。研究发现,债券融资与企业创新之间显著正相关,表明债券融资优化企业债务结构、提升企业创新能力的积极作用占据主导地位。进一步研究表明:(1)债券融资能够通过降低整体债务融资成本并延长整体债务期限促进企业创新;(2)债券融资对于银行贷款存在溢出效应,即企业通过债券融资,还能降低银行贷款利率、延长银行贷款期限,进而促进企业创新;(3)产品市场竞争和代理问题会在一定程度上削弱债券融资对企业创新的促进作用;(4)不同类型的债券对企业创新能力的作用存在异质性,债券发行的便利性是其影响企业创新的一个重要因素。     

The Relation Between Treasury Yields and Corporate Bond Yield Spreads

Because the option to call a corporate bond should rise in value when bond yields fall, the relation between noncallable Treasury yields and spreads of corporate bond yields over Treasury yields should depend on the callability of the corporate bond. I confirm this hypothesis for investment-grade corporate bonds. Although yield spreads on both callable and noncallable corporate bonds fall when Treasury yields rise, this relation is much stronger for callable bonds. This result has important implications for interpreting the behavior of yields on commonly used corporate bond indexes, which are composed primarily of callable bonds.     

The ex ante real rate and inflation premium under a habit consumption model

This paper analyzes and quantifies ex ante components of bond yields – real rate of returns and risk premiums – from observed prices of nominal and indexed bonds in the United Kingdom from 1983 to 2000. The estimation uses an asset pricing framework based on a habit consumption model together with a joint formulation of consumption growth and inflation. Nominal yields carry a time-varying inflation premium that is significant throughout the period, increasing in the bond's maturity and contributing up to 25 basis points to yearly nominal yields. The analysis allows the extraction of the ex ante real rate from indexed bonds by properly taking into account both the incomplete indexation on these instruments and the inflation premium embedded in the nominal bonds.     

Do Bond Covenants Affect Borrowing Costs?

High yield bond investors spend a great deal of time studying covenants. They even hire specialized consultants to help them interpret the dense language of indentures. But for all that, does a company's decision to offer strong rather than weak covenants—or to offer covenants at all—have a measurable impact on its borrowing costs? There is surprisingly little evidence that variation in credit risk premiums reflects the presence or absence of covenants. Taking advantage of a newly available kind of data—Moody's Investors Service's Covenant Quality (CQ) ratings, which were initiated in 2011—the authors studied each newly issued U.S. high yield bond beginning in 2011 using Moody's CQ ratings, where a rating of “1” represents the strongest covenant rating and “5” the weakest. The authors hypothesize that if investors are willing to pay for covenant protection, bonds with weak CQ scores should have spreads that are higher, on average, than the medians of the bonds in their rating group. What they found, however, was that even bonds rated CQ5, indicating negligible protection, had spreads that were only 9.54 basis points higher than the median of companies with the same credit rating. The authors also found, contrary to their initial supposition, that higher yields were associated with stronger covenants, suggesting that investors demand more protection on issues they view as having greater credit risk than other equivalently rated issues.     

Determinants of bond tender premiums and the percentage tendered

We analyze a large sample of US corporate bond tender offers to understand what affects tender premiums as well as the percentage of bonds tendered. For the average (median) tender offer, the tender price is 5.55% (3.24%) greater than the pre-tender market price while the percentage of bonds tendered is 82.3% (94.6%). Premiums offered by firms are greater when the firm is simultaneously soliciting consents to amend restrictive covenants and when the bond has a greater number of restrictive covenants. Premiums are also greater when long-term risk-free yields are low and the yield curve is flatter – conditions where a firm might want to lock in favorable long-term rates by issuing new debt and retiring old debt. Bondholders respond to higher tender premiums by tendering a greater percentage of their bonds – a 1% increase in tender premium increases the tendering rate by approximately 9%. Bondholders also tender a greater percentage of bonds possessing less desirable characteristics such as a short remaining maturity or bonds that are simultaneously undergoing consent solicitations. Finally, we find that tender offers are easier to complete when bond ownership concentration is greater.     

从城投债到市政债

本文分析了我国城投债发行的现状,评估了当前城投债所存在的风险。相比城投债,市政债具有偿债责任明确、透明度较高、投资者分散等优势。本文提出了过渡到市政债的具体发展路径。     

On the Relative Performance of Investment‐Grade Corporate Bonds with Differing Maturities

We find that short‐maturity investment‐grade corporate bonds perform better, controlling for risk differences, than similar bonds with longer maturities. Our results are at least partially attributable to insurance companies’ trading behavior and align with the preferred‐habitat theory of the term structure. We find that insurance‐company purchases create a strong demand for long‐term bonds and that their rebalancing activity results in sales of short‐term bonds. As documented by extant literature, such demand‐supply imbalance is not easily resolved by arbitrageurs or firms seeking to time the market with bond issuance.     

Bond tender offers in mergers and acquisitions

We explore the motives and consequences of bond tender offers announced in connection with mergers and acquisitions (M&A). We find merging firms use bond tender offers strategically to renegotiate with bondholders to gain financial flexibility by reducing leverage and eliminating covenants, and to curtail the coinsurance benefits associated with M&A. Moreover, we find bondholder wealth effects depend not only on the bond's own characteristics, but also on the characteristics of its sibling bonds. Finally, the use of bond tender offers in M&A is associated with increased likelihood of deal consummation and lower acquisition premiums.     

Was the Tax-Exempt Bond Market Inefficient or Were Future Expected Tax Rates Negative?

This paper shows that the sharp narrowing with maturity of the spread between taxable and tax-exempt yields leaves room for tax arbitrage. At times, tax-exempt forward rates have exceeded taxable forward rates. At such times, only expectations of higher taxes on Treasury than on municipal bonds would eliminate profit opportunities. The authors develop the idea of forward tax rates and compute forward tax rates for 1955 through 1984. They also outline tax-arbitrage mechanisms involving private forward sale of long municipal bonds or the use of the Municipal Bond Futures Contract and show the potential profits.