IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedcwq/90365.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Municipal Markets and the Municipal Liquidity Facility

Author

Listed:
  • John Bagley
  • Nicholas Fritsch
  • Shawn Nee

Abstract

Municipal bond markets experienced a significant amount of strain in response to the COVID-19 crisis, creating liquidity and credit concerns among market participants. During the economic shutdown resulting from the pandemic, income tax revenues were deferred and sales tax revenues decreased beginning in spring 2020, while the cost of borrowing significantly increased for municipal issuers. To aid municipal borrowing needs, the Federal Reserve implemented the Municipal Liquidity Facility (MLF) on April 9, 2020. In this analysis we describe the municipal market conditions as they evolved during 2020, we document the response by the Federal Reserve to municipal market distress with a focus on the MLF, and we conduct an event study to examine MLF-related impacts on market index yield spreads. We detail two case studies that compare yield spreads for two issuers that had sold debt to the MLF and find that yield spreads in secondary market transactions for these two issuers were notably reduced after a public announcement of intent to sell debt to the MLF. Our results present additional evidence that the MLF had a positive impact on municipal market functioning during the pandemic period.

Suggested Citation

  • John Bagley & Nicholas Fritsch & Shawn Nee, 2021. "Municipal Markets and the Municipal Liquidity Facility," Working Papers 21-07, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedcwq:90365
    DOI: 10.26509/frbc-wp-202107
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.26509/frbc-wp-202107
    File Function: Full Text
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.26509/frbc-wp-202107?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
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Richard C. Green & Dan Li & Norman Schürhoff, 2010. "Price Discovery in Illiquid Markets: Do Financial Asset Prices Rise Faster Than They Fall?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 65(5), pages 1669-1702, October.
    2. 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.
    3. Neely, Christopher J., 2015. "Unconventional monetary policy had large international effects," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 52(C), pages 101-111.
    4. Schultz, Paul, 2012. "The market for new issues of municipal bonds: The roles of transparency and limited access to retail investors," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 106(3), pages 492-512.
    5. Svensson, L.E.O., 1994. "Estimating and Interpreting Foreward Interest Rates: Sweden 1992-1994," Papers 579, Stockholm - International Economic Studies.
    6. 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.
    7. 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.
    8. Campbell, Sean & Covitz, Daniel & Nelson, William & Pence, Karen, 2011. "Securitization markets and central banking: An evaluation of the term asset-backed securities loan facility," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 58(5), pages 518-531.
    9. Stephan D. Whitaker, 2020. "How Much Help Do State and Local Governments Need? Updated Estimates of Revenue Losses from Pandemic Mitigation," Cleveland Fed District Data Brief 88241, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
    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. 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).

    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. 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.
    2. Dan Li & Norman Schürhoff, 2019. "Dealer Networks," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 74(1), pages 91-144, February.
    3. 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).
    4. Stephanie F. Cheng, 2021. "The Information Externality of Public Firms’ Financial Information in the State‐Bond Secondary Market," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 59(2), pages 529-574, May.
    5. 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.
    6. Cornaggia, Kimberly & Hund, John & Nguyen, Giang, 2022. "Investor attention and municipal bond returns," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 60(C).
    7. Francis Breedon & Jagjit S. Chadha & Alex Waters, 2012. "The financial market impact of UK quantitative easing," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 28(4), pages 702-728, WINTER.
    8. 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.
    9. 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.
    10. Cuny, Christine, 2018. "When knowledge is power: Evidence from the municipal bond market," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 65(1), pages 109-128.
    11. Lu, Runjing & Ye, Zihan, 2023. "Roe v. Rates: Reproductive Healthcare and Public Financing Costs," SocArXiv 7t5jz, Center for Open Science.
    12. 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).
    13. Farrell, Michael & Murphy, Dermot & Painter, Marcus & Zhang, Guangli, 2023. "The complexity yield puzzle: A textual analysis of municipal bond disclosures," Working Papers 338, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State.
    14. 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.
    15. Claudio Borio & Anna Zabai, 2018. "Unconventional monetary policies: a re-appraisal," Chapters, in: Peter Conti-Brown & Rosa M. Lastra (ed.), Research Handbook on Central Banking, chapter 20, pages 398-444, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    16. 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.
    17. Chalmers, John & Liu, Yu (Steve) & Wang, Z. Jay, 2021. "The difference a day makes: Timely disclosure and trading efficiency in the muni market," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 139(1), pages 313-335.
    18. Yulianti Abbas, 2022. "Financial statement timeliness and bond‐price dispersion in the municipal market," Public Budgeting & Finance, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 42(1), pages 66-97, March.
    19. Cenedese, Gino & Ranaldo, Angelo & Vasios, Michalis, 2020. "OTC premia," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 136(1), pages 86-105.
    20. Han, Song & Huang, Alan Guoming & Kalimipalli, Madhu & Wang, Ke, 2022. "Information and liquidity of over-the-counter securities: Evidence from public registration of Rule 144A bonds," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 59(PB).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    onetary Policy; Policy Effects; Stabilization; Bond Market; Security Markets; Government Bonds; Local Government Bonds;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E50 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - General
    • G51 - Financial Economics - - Household Finance - - - Household Savings, Borrowing, Debt, and Wealth
    • 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:fip:fedcwq:90365. 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: 4D Library (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbclus.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.