IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jbfina/v143y2022ics0378426622001868.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

COVID-19, lockdowns, and the municipal bond market

Author

Listed:
  • Tran, Nhu
  • Uzmanoglu, Cihan

Abstract

We study how investors in the US municipal bond market price the state lockdowns announced during the coronavirus (COVID) pandemic. To begin with, we examine the extent to which state-level COVID developments influence yield spreads of municipal bonds. We find that macro-level factors are the primary determinants of municipal bond spreads during the pandemic, but state-level COVID developments also matter at the margin. For instance, a doubling of new COVID cases in a state is associated with a 2% (1.4 basis points) increase in yield spreads of municipal bonds issued in that state. Accordingly, lockdowns may decrease municipal bond spreads by reducing COVID cases, but lockdowns may also increase them by reducing local economic activities. Overall, we find that yield spreads in both primary and secondary municipal bond markets increase by about 15% following lockdown announcements, suggesting that lockdown announcements increase the risk premiums investors require for holding municipal bonds.

Suggested Citation

  • Tran, Nhu & Uzmanoglu, Cihan, 2022. "COVID-19, lockdowns, and the municipal bond market," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 143(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jbfina:v:143:y:2022:i:c:s0378426622001868
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jbankfin.2022.106590
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378426622001868
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.jbankfin.2022.106590?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

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

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Marco Cipriani & Andrew F. Haughwout & Benjamin Hyman & Anna Kovner & Gabriele La Spada & Matthew Lieber & Shawn Nee, 2020. "Municipal Debt Markets and the COVID-19 Pandemic," Liberty Street Economics 20200629, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    2. Hansen, Lars Peter, 1982. "Large Sample Properties of Generalized Method of Moments Estimators," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 50(4), pages 1029-1054, July.
    3. Goodell, John W. & Huynh, Toan Luu Duc, 2020. "Did Congress trade ahead? Considering the reaction of US industries to COVID-19," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 36(C).
    4. Pengpeng Yue & Aslihan Gizem Korkmaz & Haigang Zhou, 2020. "Household Financial Decision Making Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic," Emerging Markets Finance and Trade, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 56(10), pages 2363-2377, August.
    5. Jeffrey M Wooldridge, 2010. "Econometric Analysis of Cross Section and Panel Data," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 2, volume 1, number 0262232588, April.
    6. Robert Novy-Marx & Joshua D. Rauh, 2012. "Fiscal Imbalances and Borrowing Costs: Evidence from State Investment Losses," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 4(2), pages 182-213, May.
    7. Francis A. Longstaff, 2011. "Municipal Debt and Marginal Tax Rates: Is There a Tax Premium in Asset Prices?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 66(3), pages 721-751, June.
    8. Augustin Landier & David Thesmar, 2020. "Earnings Expectations in the COVID Crisis," NBER Working Papers 27160, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    9. Viral V Acharya & Sascha Steffen, 2020. "The Risk of Being a Fallen Angel and the Corporate Dash for Cash in the Midst of COVID," The Review of Corporate Finance Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 9(3), pages 430-471.
    10. Michael Schwert, 2017. "Municipal Bond Liquidity and Default Risk," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 72(4), pages 1683-1722, August.
    11. Andrew F. Haughwout & Benjamin Hyman & Or Shachar, 2021. "The Option Value of Municipal Liquidity: Evidence from Federal Lending Cutoffs during COVID-19," Staff Reports 988, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    12. Ang, Andrew & Longstaff, Francis A., 2013. "Systemic sovereign credit risk: Lessons from the U.S. and Europe," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 60(5), pages 493-510.
    13. Gao, Pengjie & Lee, Chang & Murphy, Dermot, 2019. "Municipal borrowing costs and state policies for distressed municipalities," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 132(2), pages 404-426.
    14. Douglas Staiger & James H. Stock, 1997. "Instrumental Variables Regression with Weak Instruments," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 65(3), pages 557-586, May.
    15. Andrew Ang & Vineer Bhansali & Yuhang Xing, 2010. "Taxes on Tax‐Exempt Bonds," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 65(2), pages 565-601, April.
    16. Diane Alexander & Ezra Karger, 2023. "Do Stay-at-Home Orders Cause People to Stay at Home? Effects of Stay-at-Home Orders on Consumer Behavior," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 105(4), pages 1017-1027, July.
    17. Alexander W. Butler, 2008. "Distance Still Matters: Evidence from Municipal Bond Underwriting," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 21(2), pages 763-784, April.
    18. Juan M. Sanchez & Olivia Wilkinson, 2020. "How COVID-19 Has Affected the Municipal Bond Market," The Regional Economist, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, vol. 28(4), October.
    19. Lawrence E. Harris & Michael S. Piwowar, 2006. "Secondary Trading Costs in the Municipal Bond Market," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 61(3), pages 1361-1397, June.
    20. Alexander W. Butler & Larry Fauver & Sandra Mortal, 2009. "Corruption, Political Connections, and Municipal Finance," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 22(7), pages 2673-2705, July.
    21. Wang, Junbo & Wu, Chunchi & Zhang, Frank X., 2008. "Liquidity, default, taxes, and yields on municipal bonds," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 32(6), pages 1133-1149, June.
    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. Ruan, Qingsong & Lv, Dayong & Wei, Xiaokun, 2024. "High-speed rail and local government financing cost: Evidence from China," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 131(C).
    2. Zhang, Cheng & Lee, Yun-Chi & Ho, Kung-Cheng & Shen, Xixi, 2023. "Influence of institutional differences on trade credit use during pandemics," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 77(C).
    3. Huang, Bin & Wang, Bin & Chen, Zixuan, 2024. "Individual investment adaptations to COVID-19 lockdowns," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 70(C).

    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. Tran, Nhu & Uzmanoglu, Cihan, 2023. "Reprint of: COVID-19, lockdowns, and the municipal bond market," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 147(C).
    2. Gao, Pengjie & Lee, Chang & Murphy, Dermot, 2019. "Municipal borrowing costs and state policies for distressed municipalities," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 132(2), pages 404-426.
    3. Butler, Alexander W. & Yi, Hanyi, 2022. "Aging and public financing costs: Evidence from U.S. municipal bond markets," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 211(C).
    4. Gao, Pengjie & Lee, Chang & Murphy, Dermot, 2020. "Financing dies in darkness? The impact of newspaper closures on public finance," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 135(2), pages 445-467.
    5. Andrew F. Haughwout & Benjamin Hyman & Or Shachar, 2021. "The Option Value of Municipal Liquidity: Evidence from Federal Lending Cutoffs during COVID-19," Staff Reports 988, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    6. Darko B. Vukovic & Carlos J. Rincon & Moinak Maiti, 2021. "Price distortions and municipal bonds premiums: evidence from Switzerland," Financial Innovation, Springer;Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, vol. 7(1), pages 1-21, December.
    7. Dario Cestau & Burton Hollifield & Dan Li & Norman Schürhoff, 2019. "Municipal Bond Markets," Annual Review of Financial Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 11(1), pages 65-84, December.
    8. Albert Lee Chun & Ethan Namvar & Xiaoxia Ye & Fan Yu, 2019. "Modeling Municipal Yields With (and Without) Bond Insurance," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 65(8), pages 3694-3713, August.
    9. Cheng, Stephanie F. & De Franco, Gus & Lin, Pengkai, 2023. "Marijuana liberalization and public finance: A capital market perspective on the passage of medical use laws," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 75(1).
    10. Hattori, Takahiro, 2018. "Decomposing Japanese municipal bond spreads: Default and liquidity premiums in times of crisis," Journal of Asian Economics, Elsevier, vol. 59(C), pages 16-28.
    11. Lu, Runjing & Ye, Zihan, 2023. "Roe v. Rates: Reproductive Healthcare and Public Financing Costs," SocArXiv 7t5jz, Center for Open Science.
    12. Dougal, Casey & Gao, Pengjie & Mayew, William J. & Parsons, Christopher A., 2019. "What’s in a (school) name? Racial discrimination in higher education bond markets," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 134(3), pages 570-590.
    13. Huixin Bi & W. Blake Marsh, 2020. "Flight to Liquidity or Safety? Recent Evidence from the Municipal Bond Market," Research Working Paper RWP 20-19, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.
    14. Jess N. Cornaggia & Kimberly J. Cornaggia & Ryan D. Israelsen, 2020. "Where the Heart Is: Information Production and the Home Bias," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 66(12), pages 5532-5557, December.
    15. Ivanov, Ivan T. & Zimmermann, Tom & Heinrich, Nathan W., 2022. "Limits of disclosure regulation in the municipal bond market," CFR Working Papers 22-05, University of Cologne, Centre for Financial Research (CFR).
    16. 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.
    17. Woutersen, Tiemen & Hausman, Jerry A., 2019. "Increasing the power of specification tests," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 211(1), pages 166-175.
    18. Ivanov, Ivan T. & Zimmermann, Tom, 2024. "The “Privatization” of municipal debt," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 237(C).
    19. Choi, Hae Mi & Gupta-Mukherjee, Swasti, 2024. "Public sector unions and municipal debt," Global Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 60(C).
    20. Niels-Hugo Blunch & Nabanita Datta Gupta, 2020. "Mothers’ health knowledge for children with diarrhea: who you are or who you know?," Review of Economics of the Household, Springer, vol. 18(4), pages 1131-1164, December.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    COVID-19; Pandemic response; Stay-at-home orders; Nonessential business shutdowns; Municipal bonds; Cost of borrowing; Local governments; States;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing; Trading Volume; Bond Interest Rates
    • G18 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Government Policy and Regulation
    • G33 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Bankruptcy; Liquidation
    • H72 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - State and Local Budget and Expenditures
    • H74 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - State and Local Borrowing
    • H84 - Public Economics - - Miscellaneous Issues - - - Disaster Aid

    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:eee:jbfina:v:143:y:2022:i:c:s0378426622001868. 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 Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jbf .

    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.