Effect of Underwriter Prestige on the Interest Cost of Municipal Bond Offerings

The authors use tombstones from Investment Dealers' Digest to develop continuous and bracket prestige measures of underwriters in the municipal bond market. The measures are used in multivariate analysis of 409 offerings to examine the relationship between net interest cost to the issuer and prestige of the lead underwriter. Multiple regression analysis reveals that issuers in the sample do not receive statistically significant positive benefits from using prestigious underwriters. The authors note that their results are consistent with segmentation of the market for municipal bonds.