The serial debt issue structure

This chapter provides greater detail into the specifics and structure of municipal securities. Municipalities sell debt issues by combining individual bonds along the term structure into a debt issue, called a serial debt issue. Serial debt issues attract a range of investors that have varying maturity and security structure preferences. The structure of municipal securities and the pricing process are very technical in nature and require strong knowledge of fixed income mathematics. State and local government financial managers have many choices in structuring these securities and these choices have real economic policy implications. Moreover, these policy implications are not just short-term in nature but may have material impacts on the government entity for decades. That is, the financial structure policy choices made by financial managers often require basic trade-offs between time periods that can impact different generations of taxpayers. As such, these financial technicalities and policy choices demand strong finance and public policy acumen on the part of government financial managers.