IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/32647.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Banks and Tax-Exempt Debt Arbitrage

Author

Listed:
  • James R. Hines Jr.
  • Emily Horton

Abstract

Interest paid by U.S. state and local bonds is tax-exempt, making these bonds attractive to investors – though a tax rule limits arbitrage opportunities by restricting associated interest expense deductions. Prior to 1986, U.S. banks were not subject to the interest deduction limitation, making banks preferred holders of tax-exempt debt. U.S. banks used tax-exempt debt to reduce their tax liabilities by roughly 20% in the 1950s and 45% in the 1960s, rising to as much as 80% by the early 1980s. Despite their special exemption, and in part because of their widespread holdings, banks did not benefit from investing in tax-exempt bonds, as competition between banks reduced bond yields to the point of investor indifference. The absence of a tax benefit from arbitrage appears not only in observed bond yields, but also in banks’ considerable unused potential for further tax reductions. After the Tax Reform Act of 1986 removed their special tax exemption, banks significantly reduced their holdings of tax-exempt debt, particularly among banks most severely impacted by the rule change.

Suggested Citation

  • James R. Hines Jr. & Emily Horton, 2024. "Banks and Tax-Exempt Debt Arbitrage," NBER Working Papers 32647, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32647
    Note: PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w32647.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • G21 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Banks; Other Depository Institutions; Micro Finance Institutions; Mortgages
    • H25 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Business Taxes and Subsidies
    • H74 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - State and Local Borrowing

    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:nbr:nberwo:32647. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.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.