IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedbwp/96-9.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Tax-exempt bonds really do subsidize municipal capital!

Author

Listed:
  • Peter Fortune

Abstract

The traditional view of municipal finance holds that the federal tax-exemption of interest payments by state and local (municipal) governments provides a capital cost subsidy to municipal investment equal to the difference between interest rates on taxable and tax-exempt bonds. Recently, a new view has emerged which argues that tax-exemption plays a minor role, if any, in shaping municipal investment decisions. According to this new view, communities will use tax finance at the margin except in the unusual case where only debt finance is used. Thus, tax-exemption is an intramarginal (lump sum) transfer providing no incentive for municipal investment. This paper concludes that the new view's policy prescriptions rest on implausible assumptions about voters' financial opportunities and costs. In particular, the new view assumes that the decisive voter has unlimited financial assets on which he can draw to finance tax payments. The new view is shown to contain several anomalous results, including unexploited arbitrage profits and the implication that tax-exemption increases the municipal cost of capital. A broadened analysis incorporating leverage-related interest rates and constraints on financial assets and debt restores tax-exemption as a municipal capital-cost subsidy under a wide range of conditions.

Suggested Citation

  • Peter Fortune, 1996. "Tax-exempt bonds really do subsidize municipal capital!," Working Papers 96-9, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
  • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedbwp:96-9
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/wp/wp1996/wp96_9.htm
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/wp/wp1996/wp96_9.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Hulten, Charles R. & Schwab, Robert M., 1991. "A Haig-Simons-Tiebout Comprehensive Income Tax," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association, vol. 44(1), pages 67-78, March.
    2. Metcalf, G.E., 1991. "The Role Of Federal Taxation In The Supply Of Municipal Bonds: Evidence From Municipal Governments," Papers 72, Princeton, Woodrow Wilson School - John M. Olin Program.
    3. Fortune, Peter, 1998. "Tax-Exempt Bonds Really Do Subsidize Municipal Capital!," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 51(1), pages 43-54, March.
    4. Hulten, Charles R. & Schwab, Robert M., 1991. "A Haig-Simons-Tiebout Comprehensive Income Tax," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 44(1), pages 67-78, March.
    5. Gordon, Roger H & Slemrod, Joel, 1983. "A General Equilibrium Simulation Study of Subsidies to Municipal Expenditures," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 38(2), pages 585-594, May.
    6. Peter Fortune, 1984. "Tax Exemption and Resource Allocation: Implications for Prices, Production, and Factor Choice," Public Finance Review, , vol. 12(3), pages 347-364, July.
    7. Peter Fortune, 1992. "The municipal bond market, part II: problems and policies," New England Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, issue May, pages 47-64.
    8. Roger H. Gordon & Gilbert E. Metcalf, 1991. "Do Tax-Exempt Bonds Really Subsidize Municipal Capital?," NBER Working Papers 3835, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Fortune, Peter, 1998. "Tax-exempt Bonds Really Do Subsidize Municipal Capital!," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association, vol. 51(n. 1), pages 43-54, March.
    2. Bruno Sultanum & Zachary Bethune, 2016. "Decentralized Trade with Private Values," 2016 Meeting Papers 1630, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    3. Thomas Luke Spreen & Ed Gerrish, 2022. "Taxes and tax‐exempt bonds: A literature review," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 36(4), pages 767-808, September.
    4. Fortune, Peter, 1998. "Tax-Exempt Bonds Really Do Subsidize Municipal Capital!," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 51(1), pages 43-54, March.
    5. M.S. Tumanggor, 2020. "Issuance of Municipal Bonds through Capital Markets as Financial Revenue for Regional Development," International Journal of Economics & Business Administration (IJEBA), International Journal of Economics & Business Administration (IJEBA), vol. 0(3), pages 326-334.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Peter Fortune, 1995. "Debt capacity, tax exemption, and the municipal cost of capital: a reassessment of the new view," Working Papers 95-8, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
    2. Fortune, Peter, 1998. "Tax-exempt Bonds Really Do Subsidize Municipal Capital!," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association, vol. 51(n. 1), pages 43-54, March.
    3. Thomas Luke Spreen & Ed Gerrish, 2022. "Taxes and tax‐exempt bonds: A literature review," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 36(4), pages 767-808, September.
    4. Hulten, Charles R. & Schwab, Robert M., 1997. "A fiscal federalism approach to infrastructure policy," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 27(2), pages 139-159, April.
    5. M.S. Tumanggor, 2020. "Issuance of Municipal Bonds through Capital Markets as Financial Revenue for Regional Development," International Journal of Economics & Business Administration (IJEBA), International Journal of Economics & Business Administration (IJEBA), vol. 0(3), pages 326-334.
    6. Zachary Bethune & Bruno Sultanum & Nicholas Trachter, 2016. "Private Information in Over-the-Counter Markets," Working Paper 16-16, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.
    7. James M. Poterba & Arturo Ramirez Verdugo, 2008. "Portfolio Substitution and the Revenue Cost of Exempting State and Local Government Interest Payments from Federal Income Tax," NBER Working Papers 14439, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    8. H. Youn Kim & Junsoo Lee & Stephen E. Lile & James R. Ramsey, 2000. "Municipal Bonds and Tax Arbitrage: A Cointegration Analysis," Public Finance Review, , vol. 28(4), pages 372-389, July.
    9. Charles R. Hulten & Robert M. Schwab, 1988. "Income Originating in the State and Local Sector," NBER Chapters, in: Fiscal Federalism: Quantitative Studies, pages 215-254, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    10. Fullerton, Don & Metcalf, Gilbert E., 2002. "Tax incidence," Handbook of Public Economics, in: A. J. Auerbach & M. Feldstein (ed.), Handbook of Public Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 26, pages 1787-1872, Elsevier.
    11. Berkovec, James & Fullerton, Don, 1989. "The General Equilibrium Effects of Inflation on Housing Consumption and Investment," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 79(2), pages 277-282, May.
    12. Edward V. Regan, "undated". "A New Approach to Tax-Exempt Bonds, Infrastructure: Financing with the AGIS Bond," Economics Public Policy Brief Archive ppb_58, Levy Economics Institute.
    13. Edward L. Glaeser, 2012. "Urban Public Finance," NBER Working Papers 18244, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    14. Joel Slemrod, 1984. "A General Equilibrium Model of Taxation That Uses Micro-Unit Data: Withan Application to the Impact of Instituting a Flat-Rate Income Tax," NBER Working Papers 1461, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    15. Charles R. Hulten & Robert M. Schwab, 1987. "Income Originating in the State and Local Sector," NBER Working Papers 2314, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    16. James M. Poterba, 1984. "Expected Future Tax Policy and Tax Exempt Bond Yields," Working papers 350, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Department of Economics.
    17. Joel Slemrod, 1985. "The Impact of Tax Reform on Households," NBER Working Papers 1765, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    18. Randall W. Eberts & William F. Fox, 1992. "The Effect of Federal Policies On Local Public Infrastructure Investment," Public Finance Review, , vol. 20(4), pages 557-571, October.
    19. Robert P. Inman, 1993. "Presidential Leadership and the Reform of Fiscal Policy: Learning from Reagan's Role in TRA 86," NBER Working Papers 4395, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    20. Merle Erickson & Austan Goolsbee & Edward Maydew, 2002. "How Prevalent is Tax Arbitrage? Evidence from the Market for Municipal Bonds," NBER Working Papers 9105, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fedbwp:96-9. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Spozio (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbbous.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.