IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/brd/wpaper/87.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Changing Patterns in Household Ownership of Municipal Debt: Evidence from the 1989-2013 Surveys of Consumer Finances

Author

Listed:
  • Daniel Bergstresser

    (Brandeis University)

  • Randolph Cohen

    (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Abstract

The period since 1989 has seen significant changes in the structure of household ownership of municipal debt, with ownership becoming concentrated in a smaller number of households over time. The share of households holding any municipal debt fell from 4.6 percent to 2.4 percent between 1989 and 2013. The share of total debt that is held by the wealthiest 0.5 percent of households rose from 24 percent to 42 percent over the same period. These changes have coincided with the growth of tax-deferred retirement investment accounts such as 401(k) plans as a primary location of household investing. Municipal bonds, which pay tax-exempt interest, are almost never held inside of these tax-deferred accounts. These changing patterns of ownership have implications for the political economy of the municipal bond market.

Suggested Citation

  • Daniel Bergstresser & Randolph Cohen, 2015. "Changing Patterns in Household Ownership of Municipal Debt: Evidence from the 1989-2013 Surveys of Consumer Finances," Working Papers 87, Brandeis University, Department of Economics and International Business School.
    • Handle: RePEc:brd:wpaper:87
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.brandeis.edu/economics/RePEc/brd/doc/Brandeis_WP87.pdf
    File Function: First version, 2015
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Arthur B. Kennickell & R. Louise Woodburn, 1999. "CONSISTENT WEIGHT DESIGN FOR THE 1989, 1992 AND 1995 SCFs, AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 45(2), pages 193-215, June.
    2. Daniel Feenberg & Elisabeth Coutts, 1993. "An introduction to the TAXSIM model," Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 12(1), pages 189-194.
    3. Bulow, Jeremy & Rogoff, Kenneth, 1989. "Sovereign Debt: Is to Forgive to Forget?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 79(1), pages 43-50, March.
    4. Bergstresser, Daniel & Poterba, James, 2004. "Asset allocation and asset location: household evidence from the survey of consumer finances," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 88(9-10), pages 1893-1915, August.
    5. Lisa J. Dettling & Joanne W. Hsu, 2014. "The State of Young Adults’ Balance Sheets: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, vol. 96(4), pages 305-330.
    6. Alexander Guembel & Oren Sussman, 2009. "Sovereign Debt without Default Penalties," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 76(4), pages 1297-1320.
    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. Konul Amrahova Riegel, 2021. "Solving the Muni Puzzle: Who Benefits from Tax Exemption of Government Debt?," Public Finance Review, , vol. 49(1), pages 71-105, January.
    2. Bi, Huixin & Traum, Nora, 2023. "Unconventional monetary policy and local fiscal policy," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 156(C).
    3. Tania Babina & Chotibhak Jotikasthira & Christian Lundblad & Tarun Ramadorai, 2021. "Heterogeneous Taxes and Limited Risk Sharing: Evidence from Municipal Bonds [The distribution of realized stock return volatility]," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 34(1), pages 509-568.
    4. John M. Griffin & Nicholas Hirschey & Samuel Kruger, 2023. "Do Municipal Bond Dealers Give Their Customers “Fair and Reasonable” Pricing?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 78(2), pages 887-934, April.

    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. Amromin, Gene & Huang, Jennifer & Sialm, Clemens, 2007. "The tradeoff between mortgage prepayments and tax-deferred retirement savings," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 91(10), pages 2014-2040, November.
    2. Andreasen, Eugenia & Sandleris, Guido & Van der Ghote, Alejandro, 2019. "The political economy of sovereign defaults," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 104(C), pages 23-36.
    3. Nicola Gennaioli & Alberto Martin & Stefano Rossi, 2014. "Sovereign Default, Domestic Banks, and Financial Institutions," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 69(2), pages 819-866, April.
    4. Acharya, Viral V. & Rajan, Raghuram G. & Shim, Jack B., 2024. "Sovereign debt and economic growth when government is myopic and self-interested," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 150(C).
    5. Moore, Kevin B., 2012. "Effective Tax Rates and Measures of Business Size," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 65(4), pages 841-862, December.
    6. Guido Sandleris, 2016. "The Costs of Sovereign Default: Theory and Empirical Evidence," Economía Journal, The Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association - LACEA, vol. 0(Spring 20), pages 1-27, April.
    7. Chen, Hsien-Yi & Chen, Sheng-Syan, 2018. "Quality of government institutions and spreads on sovereign credit default swaps," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 87(C), pages 82-95.
    8. Amrita Dhillon & Andrew Pickering & Tomas Sjöström, 2019. "Sovereign debt: election concerns and the democratic disadvantage," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 71(2), pages 320-343.
    9. Jaume Ventura & Fernando Broner, 2008. "Rethinking the effects of financial liberalization," 2008 Meeting Papers 747, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    10. Juan Rojas & Carlos Urrutia, 2004. "Social Security Reform with Uninsurable Income Risk and Endogenous Borrowing Constraints," Macroeconomics 0410010, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    11. Mengus, E., 2014. "Honoring Sovereign Debt or Bailing Out Domestic Residents: A Theory of Internal Costs of Default," Working papers 480, Banque de France.
    12. Patrick Bolton & Olivier Jeanne, 2009. "Structuring and Restructuring Sovereign Debt: The Role of Seniority -super-1," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 76(3), pages 879-902.
    13. E. Mengus, 2014. "International Bailouts: Why Did Banks' Collective Bet Lead Europe to Rescue Greece?," Working papers 502, Banque de France.
    14. Fernando Broner & Jaume Ventura, 2016. "Rethinking the Effects of Financial Globalization," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 131(3), pages 1497-1542.
    15. Luca Agnello & Vítor Castro & Ricardo M. Sousa, 2018. "The Legacy and the Tyranny of Time: Exit and Re‐Entry of Sovereigns to International Capital Markets," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 50(8), pages 1969-1994, December.
    16. Jesse Bricker & Kevin B. Moore & Jeffrey P. Thompson, 2019. "Trends in Household Portfolio Composition," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2019-069, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    17. Rui Esteves & João Tovar Jalles, 2016. "Like Father Like Sons? The Cost of Sovereign Defaults in Reduced Credit to the Private Sector," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 48(7), pages 1515-1545, October.
    18. Acharya, Viral V. & Rajan, Raghuram G. & Shim, Jack B., 2024. "Reprint of “Sovereign debt and economic growth when government is myopic and self-interested”," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 149(C).
    19. Mengus, Eric, 2018. "Honoring sovereign debt or bailing out domestic residents? The limits to bailouts," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 114(C), pages 14-24.
    20. Stephan Luck & Paul Schempp, 2014. "Sovereign Defaults, Bank Runs, and Contagion," Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods 2014_15, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Municipal bonds;

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:brd:wpaper:87. 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: Andrea Luna (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/gsbraus.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.