IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jfinec/v166y2025ics0304405x25000303.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The impact of bank financing on municipalities’ bond issuance and the real economy

Author

Listed:
  • Dagostino, Ramona

Abstract

Do federal tax incentives for banks investing in municipal bonds support local governments during recessions? This paper exploits a change in tax benefits for banks purchasing municipal bonds and finds that expanding access to bank financing during recessions increases local governments’ debt issuance and employment growth. The estimated job multiplier is 22 jobs per million dollars of spending. There is moderate evidence of mortgage loans being crowded out by banks’ increased holdings of municipal bonds.

Suggested Citation

  • Dagostino, Ramona, 2025. "The impact of bank financing on municipalities’ bond issuance and the real economy," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 166(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jfinec:v:166:y:2025:i:c:s0304405x25000303
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jfineco.2025.104022
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304405X25000303
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.jfineco.2025.104022?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. Trzcinka, Charles A, 1982. "The Pricing of Tax-Exempt Bonds and the Miller Hypothesis," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 37(4), pages 907-923, September.
    2. Daniel J. Wilson, 2012. "Fiscal Spending Jobs Multipliers: Evidence from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 4(3), pages 251-282, August.
    3. Yi Huang & Marco Pagano & Ugo Panizza, 2020. "Local Crowding‐Out in China," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 75(6), pages 2855-2898, December.
    4. Gabriel Chodorow-Reich & Laura Feiveson & Zachary Liscow & William Gui Woolston, 2012. "Does State Fiscal Relief during Recessions Increase Employment? Evidence from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 4(3), pages 118-145, August.
    5. Manuel Adelino & Igor Cunha & Miguel A. Ferreira, 2017. "The Economic Effects of Public Financing: Evidence from Municipal Bond Ratings Recalibration," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 30(9), pages 3223-3268.
    6. Richard C. Green & Burton Hollifield & Norman Schürhoff, 2007. "Financial Intermediation and the Costs of Trading in an Opaque Market," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 20(2), pages 275-314.
    7. Steven Ongena & Alexander Popov & Neeltje Van Horen, 2019. "The Invisible Hand of the Government: Moral Suasion during the European Sovereign Debt Crisis," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 11(4), pages 346-379, October.
    8. Carlo Altavilla & Marco Pagano & Saverio Simonelli, 2017. "Bank Exposures and Sovereign Stress Transmission," Review of Finance, European Finance Association, vol. 21(6), pages 2103-2139.
    9. Bill Dupor & Peter B. McCrory, 2018. "A Cup Runneth Over: Fiscal Policy Spillovers from the 2009 Recovery Act," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 128(611), pages 1476-1508, June.
    10. Viral Acharya & Itamar Drechsler & Philipp Schnabl, 2014. "A Pyrrhic Victory? Bank Bailouts and Sovereign Credit Risk," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 69(6), pages 2689-2739, December.
    11. 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.
    12. Emi Nakamura & J?n Steinsson, 2014. "Fiscal Stimulus in a Monetary Union: Evidence from US Regions," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(3), pages 753-792, March.
    13. Broner, Fernando & Erce, Aitor & Martin, Alberto & Ventura, Jaume, 2014. "Sovereign debt markets in turbulent times: Creditor discrimination and crowding-out effects," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 61(C), pages 114-142.
    14. Bottero, Margherita & Lenzu, Simone & Mezzanotti, Filippo, 2020. "Sovereign debt exposure and the bank lending channel: Impact on credit supply and the real economy," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 126(C).
    15. De Marco, Filippo, 2019. "Bank Lending and the European Sovereign Debt Crisis," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 54(1), pages 155-182, February.
    16. Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham & Isaac Sorkin & Henry Swift, 2020. "Bartik Instruments: What, When, Why, and How," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 110(8), pages 2586-2624, August.
    17. Indraneel Chakraborty & Itay Goldstein & Andrew MacKinlay, 2018. "Housing Price Booms and Crowding-Out Effects in Bank Lending," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 31(7), pages 2806-2853.
    18. Congressional Budget Office, 2015. "Estimated Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on Employment and Economic Output in 2014," Reports 49958, Congressional Budget Office.
    19. Bo Becker & Victoria Ivashina, 2018. "Financial Repression in the European Sovereign Debt Crisis [Sovereign debt, government myopia and the financial sector]," Review of Finance, European Finance Association, vol. 22(1), pages 83-115.
    20. Chakraborty, Indraneel & Goldstein, Itay & MacKinlay, Andrew, 2020. "Monetary stimulus and bank lending," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 136(1), pages 189-218.
    21. Raj Chetty & John N. Friedman & Tore Olsen & Luigi Pistaferri, 2011. "Adjustment Costs, Firm Responses, and Micro vs. Macro Labor Supply Elasticities: Evidence from Danish Tax Records," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 126(2), pages 749-804.
    22. 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.
    23. Valerie A. Ramey, 2011. "Can Government Purchases Stimulate the Economy?," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 49(3), pages 673-685, September.
    24. Congressional Budget Office, 2015. "Estimated Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on Employment and Economic Output in 2014," Reports 49958, Congressional Budget Office.
    25. Tania Babina & Chotibhak Jotikasthira & Christian Lundblad & Tarun Ramadorai & Andrew Karolyi, 2021. "Heterogeneous Taxes and Limited Risk Sharing: Evidence from Municipal Bonds," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 34(1), pages 509-568.
    26. Henrik J. Kleven & Mazhar Waseem, 2013. "Using Notches to Uncover Optimization Frictions and Structural Elasticities: Theory and Evidence from Pakistan," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 128(2), pages 669-723.
    27. Green, Richard C, 1993. "A Simple Model of the Taxable and Tax-Exempt Yield Curves," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 6(2), pages 233-264.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    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. Dupor, Bill & Guerrero, Rodrigo, 2017. "Local and aggregate fiscal policy multipliers," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 92(C), pages 16-30.
    2. Crosignani, Matteo & Faria-e-Castro, Miguel & Fonseca, Luís, 2020. "The (Unintended?) consequences of the largest liquidity injection ever," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 112(C), pages 97-112.
    3. Bessho, Shun-ichiro, 2021. "Local fiscal multipliers and population aging in Japan," Japan and the World Economy, Elsevier, vol. 60(C).
    4. Matteo Crosignani, 2015. "Why Are Banks Not Recapitalized During Crises?," Working Papers 203, Oesterreichische Nationalbank (Austrian Central Bank).
    5. Anil Ari, 2015. "Sovereign Risk and Bank Risk-Taking," Working Papers 202, Oesterreichische Nationalbank (Austrian Central Bank).
    6. Ohls, Jana, 2017. "Moral suasion in regional government bond markets," Discussion Papers 33/2017, Deutsche Bundesbank.
    7. Yi Huang & Marco Pagano & Ugo Panizza, 2020. "Local Crowding‐Out in China," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 75(6), pages 2855-2898, December.
    8. Carpinelli, Luisa & Crosignani, Matteo, 2021. "The design and transmission of central bank liquidity provisions," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 141(1), pages 27-47.
    9. Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, 2017. "Geographic Cross-Sectional Fiscal Multipliers: What Have We Learned?," Working Paper 458091, Harvard University OpenScholar.
    10. Casiraghi, Marco, 2020. "Bailouts, sovereign risk and bank portfolio choices," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 119(C).
    11. Saka, Orkun, 2018. "Domestic banks as lightning rods? Home bias and information during Eurozone crisis," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 118921, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    12. Liu, Cai & Varotto, Simone, 2021. "Is small beautiful? The resilience of small banks during the European debt crisis," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 76(C).
    13. Baridhi Malakar, 2024. "Essays on Responsible and Sustainable Finance," Papers 2406.12995, arXiv.org.
    14. Stine Louise von Rüden & Marti G Subrahmanyam & Dragon Yongjun Tang & Sarah Qian Wang, 2023. "Can Central Banks Boost Corporate Investment? Evidence from ECB Liquidity Injections," The Review of Corporate Finance Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 12(2), pages 402-442.
    15. Vivek Sharma & Edgar Silgado-Gómez, 2019. "Sovereign Spread Volatility and Banking Sector," CEIS Research Paper 454, Tor Vergata University, CEIS, revised 08 Mar 2019.
    16. Albertazzi, Ugo & Cimadomo, Jacopo & Maffei-Faccioli, Nicolò, 2021. "Foreign banks and the doom loop," Working Paper Series 2540, European Central Bank.
    17. Crosignani, Matteo, 2021. "Bank capital, government bond holdings, and sovereign debt capacity," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 141(2), pages 693-704.
    18. Luisa Carpinelli & Matteo Crosignani, 2017. "The Effect of Central Bank Liquidity Injections on Bank Credit Supply," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2017-038, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    19. Affinito, Massimiliano & Albareto, Giorgio & Santioni, Raffaele, 2022. "Purchases of sovereign debt securities by banks during the crisis: The role of balance sheet conditions," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 138(C).
    20. Zou, Yanchi, 2024. "The impact of fiscal stimulus on employment: Evidence from China’s four-trillion RMB package," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 131(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Municipal bonds; Tax policy; Employment; Recession; Bank financing; Crowding out; Multiplier;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H74 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - State and Local Borrowing
    • H72 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - State and Local Budget and Expenditures
    • E62 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - Fiscal Policy; Modern Monetary Theory

    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:jfinec:v:166:y:2025:i:c:s0304405x25000303. 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/inca/505576 .

    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.